
Class ?5 3 533 
BookJLLZ\5&- 



CQEXRIGHT DEPOSm 



OTHER BOOKS BY BISHOP QUAYLE 

BOOKS AS A DELIGHT 

THE THRONE OF GRACE 

BESIDE LAKE BEAUTIFUL 

POEMS 

THE CLIMB TO GOD 

A STUDY IN CURRENT SOCIAL THEORIES 

LAYMEN IN ACTION 

THE SONG OF SONGS 

THE PASTOR-PREACHER 

GOD'S CALENDAR 

IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS 

THE PRAIRIE AND THE SEA 

LOWELL 

THE BLESSED LIFE 

ETERNITY IN THE HEART 

A HERO AND SOME OTHER FOLK 

THE POET'S POET AND OTHER ESSAYS 

BOOKS AND LIFE 

RECOVERED YESTERDAYS IN LITERATURE 

THE DYNAMITE OF GOD 

THE UNCOMMON COMMONPLACE 



With Earth and Sky 



By 
WILLIAM A. QUAYLE 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



t:=n 



^'h, 






Copyright, 1922, by 
WILLIAM A. QUAYLE 



APR -5 1922 



Printed in the United States of America 



©CIA659622 



CONTENTS 

FAOB 

I. A Gust of Wonder 7 

II. On the Banks of the Delaware 11 

III. Dandelions 17 

IV. The Joy of Winter 24 

V. On My First Finding Trailing Arbutus. . . 32 

VI. En Route Through Paradise 37 

VII. A Madrigal of the Night 44 

Vni. A Surprise of the Desert 48 

IX. I Heard a Blue Bird 53 

X. The Fun op Making Garden 60 

XI. The Meadow Larks Singing and Silent ... 76 
XII. Under the Tent of the Wild Crab Blos- 
soming 82 

XIII. Where Mountain and Prairie Meet 89 

XIV. When the World is an Apple Orchard in 

Full Bloom 94 

XV. When the World is an Apple Orchard in 

Full Fruit 108 

XVI. A June Idyl 130 

XVII. When Cowslips Bloom 135 

XVIII. Double Poetry 141 

XIX. Once Upon a Time 146 

XX. June o' the Year 152 

XXI. The Curlew Call 162 

XXII. Gathering Christmas Mistletoe 170 



A GUST OF WONDER 

THE wonder about wonder is its every- 
whereness. Ubiquity is its sure mark. It 
breaks on you at the time when you could 
least think it could. It is evermore abroad like 
an immortal traveler. It goes as the permitted 
apostles of the Master with neither staff nor 
scrip. It carries provender and perpetual shelter 
for itself. Stars are not farther going nor more 
self-sufficing. 

On a day I was driving in southwest Wisconsin. 
By the month it was June and by the sky it 
was June and by the perfume it was June and 
by the blossoming it was June. No contradic- 
tion assailed the personality of June. We went 
leisurely. Another drove and garrulously wan- 
dered from theme to theme, in the main mean- 
ingless, but every now and then breaking through 
into the neighborhood of the loveliness of poetry. 
If anybody talks enough, he is as certain to 
flash into poetry as a prairie is to flash out into 
flowers. I was left to drift. The infinite was 
what we were driving through and all I had to 
do was to pay the driver. My hands were free. 
WTiile physically I was being hauled, meta- 



8 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

physically I was walking — walking out, walking 
on. If all the wings that ever bear birds above 
the world into the lovely, lonely sky had been 
attached to my shoulders and had borne me in 
transport where wings never had borne any fly- 
ing thing, I had not been so free of earth and 
so fetterless, so supreme. I was looking, looking, 
and at what was I looking .^^ Why, verily, at 
everything. He who has seen many golden days, 
shall he though a-joumey over the same land- 
scape take the landscape for granted? The 
plain answer of experience is. He may not. I 
have learned that. So when my Jehu drove, I 
out and walked. I could have proven an alibi 
on his vehicle and could have refused him remu- 
neration on the ground that I was not in his 
buggy. I was far enough away and solitary 
like a lost eagle and walking out and grateful 
as if I had been an angel. It is so royal to be 
blood kinsman of earth and sky and to salute 
them in answer to their speed and rush and 
glory. 

So on drove the driver and on walked the 
driven (to wit, myself). The splendid apocalypse 
girded me about. To the last molecule of me I 
felt the appeal of an earth eagering to grow 
harvests for the world. Not a thought of fret 
or anger at the labor of it, only supreme glad- 
ness at the heavenly endeavor of it. 

And then came the gust of wonder, a red 
clover field, affluent in bloom with a tropic 



A GUST OF WONDER 9 

abundance of flowering, perfect as a perfect rose- 
bud ready to bloom but not blooming, into 
which mass of pink loveliness came romping a 
troop of dwarf prairie roses! The clover heads 
swung lovely as evening sky-tint and the roses 
beside them and among them in full bloom! 
How it happened I cannot say. It did happen, 
is what I say. That is any happening's perfect 
proof. Had I been asked from my watching 
wild roses in bloom, to express an opinion as to 
whether it were permissible to believe they could 
grow off a settled rooting in unplowed ground of 
prairie or of roadside or in pasture or woodland, 
I had given quick rejoinder that they could not, 
and that they had to have permanency of rooting 
which could not occur in plowed field. A plowed 
field I think to be the happiest rooting for dog- 
tooth violets. On my own little farm I have 
observed the exuberant blooming of that quiet 
memorial of the early spring. No share seems 
to uproot them. They like its surly surgery 
ai\d with a sanny spring leap out to bloom like 
children to morning laughter. I have, not occa- 
sionally, traveled a thousand miles to see my 
dog-tooth violets bloom and felt myself amply 
repaid. But prairie roses, however, I thought 
indigenous to settled ground alone where no 
plow ever disturbs the quiet roots. They ask 
no farming save what God gives them. All the 
years of my watching for them across the sway- 
ing windy prairies had made me of settled con- 



10 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

victions as to their necessities, while here, all 
of my knowledge was turned into fatuity by one 
fact. Where they had every reasonable reason 
not to bloom they were blooming. I thank God 
for this sweet departure. 

Red clover and prairie roses, civilization and 
primitive nature, shining and glowing together 
at the behest of the June wind blowing fair. I 
could not believe it, yet saw it. My cocksure- 
ness about things I know, blew from me as the 
winds from the scented field blew on me. What 
I don't know seems to insist on being more 
aggressive and masterful than what I do know. 
Here was the thing that never happened, which 
is a way poetry has. 

Prairie roses swift with bloom on a level with 
the clover tops, rocking in assonance with the 
clover blooms' witchery, ridiculously inappro- 
priate yet heavenly appropriate, here actually 
happening! Ah me, for the sight of it my heart 
was glad as laughter; and I had one other added 
proof that the impossible is pretty necessarily 
certain to happen, seeing the Chief Poet is still 
out walking through his world, thrumming on his 
lute, and composing a new lyric for the gladden- 
ing of the world. 



n 

ON THE BANKS OF THE DELAWARE 

ON a bonny day of early advent of the spring 
in the State of New Jersey, I was asked 
did I wish to visit Washington's Crossing 
of the Delaware. I replied that whoever crossed 
the Delaware I wanted to visit that noble river. 
The river was significance enough. What needed 
anybody more? Few things are so engaging to 
the imagination any way, as a river. The un- 
hurried or hurried current, the breadth, the un- 
certain depth which always has the seeming 
of deep depths, the strong, majestic, forward, 
always forward, simple tenacity of purpose in 
going where it knows not, but must go, and fears 
not what banks or shoals it meets, but onward 
as certainly, though less swiftly, than a stream 
of stars along the far spaces where the night 
is lost in its own blackness. What a brave fear- 
lessness a river is and how adept it is in hearing 
the silent, voiceless voices of the far-off calling! 
I stand beside a river and am afraid. Down and 
on, on and down, nor fretting nor wearying nor 
angering, but only hungering, hungering forever 
for the sea it has not seen and depths it has 
not sounded. Wearying for the realm of loss 

11 



n WITH EARTH AND SKY 

where this wide river shall disappear like a dew- 
drop in its flood, ah, river, whatsoever name 
thou wearest and wheresoever thy fountains are, 
thou hast a charmed life. By thy side nearsighted 
eyes grow farsighted and uneventful souls catch 
glimpses of the eventful and undying. 

So a river — any river — clear as sunshine, or 
brown as the Missouri, or red as Red River, or 
green as the Yellowstone, or wild like Green 
River by the Pacific Sea, or somnolent as the 
Colorado, which is so fast asleep (as it neighbors 
on its last march to the toiling sea), so fast 
asleep that it mirrors not the stars and has not 
any flash of wave — a river, let me stand upon 
its bank and lean ear toward its plaintive whisper 
and fasten eyes on its sure-going flood and dream 
out and on with those waters which shall know 
no return and shall challenge no regret. What 
cared I for a crossing or who crossed .^^ What 
was footpath across a wandering river .'^ And 
the request, with oneself, was in a manner just. 

The river would seem to be the chief person- 
ality, whatever landscape it wore its highway 
across. You can scarcely in moods of extrav- 
agant dreaming express a formulary of sublimity 
more engaging and enthralling than a river. 
Sometimes it holds me even as an ocean cannot. 
Truly, not at all times. In the long reach of 
years and life the ocean has easy transcendency. 
It doeth with us as it will. It has not a com- 
petitor save the sky. Its engulfing is as the 



ON THE BANKS OF THE DELAWARE 13 

engulfing of eternity. But the river has its 
haunting as of the eternities also. It goes nor 
rests nor cares but only maketh music in the 
darkness or the day, careless also whether any 
hear or no, or whether any listen or no. A river 
is a pilgrim of eternity. Where the last wave- 
wash before the tireless silence shall lave the 
shore it neither cares nor thinks on. Outward, 
outward, the river must minister unto its master, 
the sea. 

But mine host brings his nag and chariot — 
or maybe the wording is amiss, for whether 
they ever in the ancient days of chariots hitched 
a single steed to a chariot I wot not. But it 
matters little. The meagerest buggy to which 
meagerest modern nag is harnessed is more 
palatable to be drawn in than the most gaudy 
chariot of forgotten days. The chariots stood 
flat against the axle: the buggy has a spring. 
That signifies the difference between our to-day 
and their yesterday. We have caught the spring 
of the swaying bough on which only the bird 
used to ride. We are become birdlike in our 
voyages and comfort. A buggy instead of a 
chariot, what say you moderns .^^ All who favor 
say "Aye." The ayes have it. We will climb to 
our seat in the modern chariot and proceed. 

"Whither go you, my friend, the charioteer?" 

"To Washington's Crossing." 

Our friend has memory. That is clear. This 
is the same place he mentioned at the start. 



14 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

He cannot be diverted. But come to think on 
he has been a presiding elder, and such cannot 
be diverted. They are brothers-in-law to the 
pole star. So we start. We are a company of 
three beside myself. They can outvote me. But 
one is a woman who cannot vote, but of what 
avail .?^ I am still outvoted unless I stuff the 
ballot, which, being a minister, I cannot be 
brought to think of. Honesty is, as it were, 
hereditary with me. I shall be outvoted. Whether 
I favor the Washington's Crossing or not, we 
shall as a party proclaim its worthiness. 

All this I foresee. But foreseeing the inevitable 
works no help. We will bear it whether we 
grin or not. But the New Jersey spring is in 
its first leaf. The branches are budded with 
greenery. The ravines along the road, each 
ravine going to Washington's Crossing as I 
silently perceive, has its little whisper of glad- 
ness in the sun; and the trees which bear blossoms 
have them in perfume and plenty, and the sky 
has the indefinable witchery of the early day- 
time of the year, and the birds in the migration 
or occupation are having their way with the sky 
and the ground, and the sun, westering, has its 
gladdest wonder in its looks; and when then we 
have trotted on a while (but barken, did chariots 
trot.?* I profess me agnostic on this point in 
Latinity and have neither time nor mood to 
look it up), jogging on (for I am pretty certain 
chariots jogged along), we came in time to a hill- 



ON THE BANKS OF THE DELAWARE 15 

top from whose watchtower gleamed the Dela- 
ware. 

How my heart answered to the river yet un- 
reached, and stretched out arms as to someone 
I loved! The Delaware, full of song and story 
and history! The Delaware — and where beside 
have I read the name? — and we proceed. It is 
ascertained that chariots did proceed, therefore 
are we now on plainly classical footing, and 
adventure forth fearlessly. 

And we come down from the hill into the croft; 
and all the ravines come down with us in a fine 
fit of good manners, and each ravine contributes 
its modicum to the Delaware, so sealing itself 
as tributary forever after the manner of the 
ancient subordinates who gave tribute. And my 
friend who directs the vaticinations of our nag 
draws lines suddenly and withal fearlessly and 
says in voice a little military, if I mistake not, 
''Washington's Crossing," 

Whereupon I become attent as becometh a 
mannerly guest, and he discourses in fine enthusi- 
asm on the night ride which General Washington 
and his hungry and thin-clad soldier followers 
took among the floating ice and, ferried over, 
fight the Hessians out, and fight the republic in. 
The crossing to the Battle of Trenton and to 
the soldier renown of sedate George Washington, 
the crossing to the Declaration of Independence 
and the Constitution and the Monroe Doctrine, 
the crossing to the settled faith that this New 



16 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

World belongs inalienably to man as man and 
to man forever. 

What has become of the Delaware? It has 
vanished utterly. I see no single shimmer of 
any wave. What has happened to the Delaware? 
Why, Washington's Crossing has happened to the 
Delaware. The river has been blotted out by 
the deed. The river has succumbed to the man. 
Man is greater than great rivers, and a great 
deed done in simple manliness for world's man- 
hood and its gain and dominion is still the 
episode for which the rivers and the hills were 
made. 

Washington's Crossing has blotted out the 
Delaware. Its channel might as well be dry. 
Rivers are they by whose banks and on whose 
currents mighty souls work mighty deeds whose 
unfretted message makes its way through all 
the skies of all the years. Man is majestical. 
And at the last man and his sublime activities 
are the solitary majesties upon this earth for 
which the rivers and the massy hills and the 
far-going seas are solely backgrounds dim as a 
shadow of a mountain on a stream by night. 



m 

DANDELIONS 

I ADMIT it. Mea culpa! Vainly have I tried 
amendment. It was but a gust and could 
not tarry. I cannot break friendship with that 
flower of riotous and inspiring sunshine. Loved 
it I have and love it I will. No one need argue 
with me. I am past that. They have argued 
with me and have argued me down. I have 
been ignominiously routed and have been sent 
at dizzying pace to uproot the dandelions on the 
lawn, but could not compass it. They looked 
at me and I was lost. Had I been blind, I think 
I should have been a mole and dug on, uproot- 
ing sunlight without a sigh. But I was not a 
mole and I was not blind, and the beckoning 
gladness of the wild rush of riotous loveliness 
carried me away on its swift-rushing torrent as 
I have been carried away by Rogue River in 
Oregon, where the stones along the bottom were 
slippy with moss and roundish of form and the 
foot could not hold and the water was swift 
and shivering and I could not hold my own, 
but went incontinently "downward with the 
flood." 

I know the dandelion has its faults, being in 
that particular a very human bit of growth. But 

17 



18 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

seeing I have lived with myself so long who 
am packed with faults as a locust with thorns, 
who am I to be uppish with others' faults? I 
do not admire the dandelion in all its activities. 
To be candid, its desire for posterity is a good 
deal too pragmatical and dogmatical. Nothing 
can stay its maternal instinct. However low you 
shave your lawn, the dandelion will, with mock 
humility, adjust its stature to your mowing, 
by rushing from leaf to bloom and from bloom 
to seed in a jiffy, and the gauze-winged seed 
floats away to keep the dandelion race alive. 
But bethink you, stern critic, 'tis instinct. And 
can we as Christians quarrel with instinct? We 
may reason with reason but we do not reason 
with instinct. Instinct does not argue: it pro- 
ceeds. No one in his senses argues with a bee 
concerning the highway he takes across the sky 
when flying, honey -burdened, from flowers to hive: 
so the dandelion instinctively wages war for im- 
mortality. She cannot be converted. Perpetuate 
her species she will. 

Some use dandelions for greens. They are 
esculent; and for one I like to see woman and 
child, basket on arm and knife in hand, wander 
over fields of the new spring, out to gather a pot 
of greens for dinner. The spring appetite is in 
the search. They have been eating canned 
goods all winter and know when they want a 
change. Really is not this call of the appetite 
for spring vegetables a sensible procedure, and 



DANDELIONS 19 

have we not who have greens in the winter and 
tomatoes out of season, have we not converted 
the season of edibles to our own impoverishment? 
I recall with zest such a rampage of hunger when, 
as a lad, I hailed the advent of the first radishes, 
and the first watermelon sent me turning happy 
somersaults. Now, through the proper household 
authority, I buy a radish insipid and unsapid and 
eat it with a shrug. And not all advancement is 
in progress. I shall not quarrel with such as, in 
spring appetite, search for and uproot dandelions. 
People have some rights the same as dandelions 
have. The entirety of privilege never does reside 
on one side of a garden fence, anyhow. 

And some use dandelions for medicine. On 
whose authority I do not know, nor for what 
they are remedial can I guess. Though there 
may be justification in taking sunlight as a body 
would if he drank this flower. Dying that others 
may not die, is an heroical activity, though fatal 
to the hero. However, if a body be not out for 
spring greens, nor an herbalist intent on medical 
design, where is the justification of slaughter of 
these smiling innocents.'^ I am temporary pro- 
prietor of a lawn, sown to grass (by assumption) 
but owned by dandelions, in fact. I have been 
bidden to expurgate this text of the dandelion. 
The bid has been dictatorial and without any 
pivot and misunderstanding. My instruction is 
unequivocal, if the truth be whispered, but I have 
been bound to reply that it would be a less task 



20 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

to uproot the grass. The dandehons had the 
right of way. If possession be points in law, 
then the dandelion in this yard may stand on his 
rights, for he is unquestioned occupant. He has 
not debated; but neither has he abated. He is 
not deploying in skirmish lines but is here in 
full force. While you are uprooting one plant 
a number of others have rooted. Just how soon 
you may extirpate a race which is born three 
times as fast as it dies I leave to statisticians to 
figure out. I am no statistician. I am a Chris- 
tian and a brother. Mark you, I have not re- 
fused to reclaim the lawn and make it a grass 
lawn. Far from that. I am no Innocent abroad, 
but a man chastened in spirit and studied in 
sobriety; but the lawn shows no progress. In 
fact, according to my domestic authority it is in a 
state of retrogression, and this I cannot deny. 
But can a man do more than a man can.'^ I go 
through the motions, I uproot no grass: I uproot 
some dandelions, but if they succeed in their own 
defense in undoing my doings, can I be blamed .^^ 
My appeal is to the fair-minded and humanitarian. 
In our home a good man can anticipate no fair 
verdict. The dandelion shall own this lawn. 
They do not attempt: they succeed. As a matter 
of whispered confidence, I may intimate that 
their open disobedience to the undisputed head 
of our house gives me interior delight. I grieve 
to see that sign of male depravity in me; but it is 
there. My spirit, I plainly see, is bent but not 



DANDELIONS 21 

broken. I could leap into rebellion myself if 
there seemed any reasonable ground for thinking 
it could succeed. Yet multitudinous attempts 
having ultimated in ignominious failure, it seems 
useless to rebel. There is no fun in getting 
squelched. There is, I am informed, fun in 
squelching, though that is gossip. I have no per- 
sonal information under that head. Outwardly, 
I am unsmiling and, to look at, even rancid, but 
inwardly I am booming in salvos of laughter. 
Every dandelion which in flat defiance of the 
head of this house bursts into laughter like a 
peal of bells, charms me and challenges me in the 
phrase of Lady Macbeth, "My lord, sleek o'er 
your rugged looks." 

Lest I make myself misunderstood, I haste to 
say that my love for the dandehon is not rooted 
primarily in the delight I find in beholding the 
head of our house defied. No, that attitude of 
mind is, so to say, a thistle which grows in my 
soul, but my soul is not a thistle field, but a dande- 
lion field. I love the dandelion, love its lavish 
unsullenness, its untamable glee, its amazed gold, 
its intricate splendor, its fabulous wealth, its 
declaration that close against the ground may 
spring a glee and glory which words do but en- 
cumber and do not elucidate. They are the very 
blossoming out of the eternal and regal surprise 
of this world. They transfigure the ground with 
daylight. They glow so that if the sun were 
dead, they could furnish the sky with dawn 



22 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

though they be dwellers on the earth and not 
luminaries of the sky. 

They make me kinsman of the resurrection. 
They leap like a sun-drenched thought. They 
do not grow: they alight like an angel at the 
Bethlehem house. They are not sent for: they 
just come. Common folks they are, but clad in 
golden glory like children of a great king. 

When winter has been long and rigorous and its 
closing months have been perverse and there 
seems no outcome of long weeks of sulky weather, 
save hope delayed, then the dandelions make a 
rush like somersaulting children and sprawling 
around abundant glory and embodied joy of ar- 
rived harvest, as of wheat fields all gold. They 
give no promissory note, nor send a blue bird 
with melodious bugle to declare their march, but 
tumble to the ground, sprawl about like a frolick 
of sunbeams kicking up, but do not kick up dust, 
but just sunlight, liquid sunlight and life at its 
spring. 

Were anyone to aver me inebriated by this rol- 
licking gold, I should not dispute nor demur. I 
should only look at the dandelion and bless God 
for its sunlight and multitude and roistering 
splendor like the wine of autumnal suns. God 
hath not often thought a sunnier thought than 
the dandelion at flower and the laughter of the 
world escaping like an angel from under the feet 
of outrageous winter. Winter is sinister, and the 
dandelion is the frankest mirth that laughs out 



DANDELIONS 23 

spontaneous, irrepressible and jubilant, the de- 
feat of the morose and the sinister — the frankest 
voice of color that I know to turn unwholesome- 
ness out of doors and bid him scamper to his 
sullen home and stay there for timeless days. 



IV 
THE JOY OF WINTER 

SUCH as esteem winter a season to be en- 
dured — a frozen roadway leading to the 
redolence of spring — are far from the truth. 
We may fairly say they knew not the truth. Spring 
is radiant; winter is jubilant. Winter trumpets 
like a warlike troop. Each season has its own 
strength, seasonableness, serenity, violence, ten- 
derness, tears, rejoicement, as the case may stand. 
Each season in its way is best; therefore those 
who endure winter are utterly amiss, and those 
who enjoy winter are utterly right. 

Winter is ushered in by the leaf-fall of melan- 
choly autumn and ushered out by the rejoicing 
of leaf-making of the gladsome spring. Ushered 
in by sadness and ushered out by joy; and its 
plateau lies high and cold like the giant uplands 
of the mountains. Let in of weeping autumn, let 
out of leafing spring. 

Winter is the season of naked strength. Its 
trees have no shadow nor music of leaves. They 
stand unadorned. Their garment is their might. 
Birds are not in their gaunt branches, save now 
and then a redbird blazes like a sudden star and 
calls with a springtime voice from a winter wood- 
land; and in naked thicket the chickadee calls 

24 



THE JOY OF WINTER 25 

with his cricket voice, "Chickadee-dee-dee-dee!" 
<\nd the night-clad crow caws with autumnal 
voice as to say all months are to his liking. But 
the music of winter is neither the music of leaves 
nor birds, but strident song of winter winds in 
branches. In winter wind is a weirdness which is 
to me like the blowing of bagpipes. This is the 
time of carnage, and battle calls fill the sky. The 
non.h wind puffs his cheeks and trumpets across the 
world. The flocks huddle, the herds shiver, the 
quails run in crowds fleet of foot as the very winds; 
the sparrows bicker from the hedgerow^s; the leaves 
huddle and toss at every whip of the wind and 
change their localities as frequently as a preacher. 
The whole spacious world has become a road- 
way for the truculent winter winds. All is open. 
Tlie north wind strides along the highways. He 
v/ashes across the cold shock-tented cornfields like 
some devastating sea. He climbs the snowy moun- 
tains with a sudden angry leap. He takes the 
breath of travelers. He garments the whole land- 
scape in storm. He hoots like the night owls; he 
whoops like a bloodthirsty Indian band; he ca- 
rouses like a drunkard; he shrieks like a maniac; 
he is sleepless as a sick man; he moans like the 
broken-hearted; he shouts like men in battle; he 
drives, a mad charioteer; he curses like a gam- 
bler who has staked all and lost all. The winter 
wind goeth every whither, calls down the chim- 
neys of the rich with a pitiful cry for admission, 
leaps into the frail houses of the very poor as if 



26 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

he were the landlord and their rent past due, 
nips with fingers like pincers the noses of the ad- 
venturous, and pounces triumphantly upon the 
proud sea and pummels its wide waters with in- 
dignant fists till the sea boils like a pot. 

Such are the doings of the winter wind. Do 
they make you shiver? Rather they should make 
you in battle humor. Indoors is no place for 
people in winter. Outdoors is the place. Shiver- 
ing by the fire is justifiable for invalids only. In 
spring people go outdoors; in winter they go in- 
doors; but the latter procedure is quite amiss. 
All seasons are outdoor seasons. Spring is time 
when we lie open to the sun; winter is time when 
men run races with the winds and the swift leaves 
and when we rejoice to feel the blood tingle and 
our pulses bound; when the fury of the world is on 
us; when the battles of our Viking folks survive in 
us. In winter we are not to flee from but toward. 

I fear me 'we have not caught the spirit of win- 
ter. We make outdoor trips under protest. We 
take the short cut. We complain at the nip of 
the wind and the frost. We say, "It is below 
zero." We shiver from place to place. We date 
everything by how near spring is. All this is 
wrong, greatly wrong. Winter is frankly glorious. 
The slow are stung to speed. The worn feel the 
tonic that seems drifted with the winter snows. 
Lassitude is all but impossible when frost writes 
its poetry on kitchen windows and the snows 
crunch under the feet and the cold stars blink 



THE JOY OF WINTER 27 

with merry twinkle in their eyes as if to say, 
"Friends, how like you this weather?" Winter is 
to be regarded, as our friend at the White House 
would name it, strenuous; and the word would 
tell the whole truth. 

This winter weather, when the wmd makes 
tiger lunges at you, is good time for you to make 
tiger lunges at the wind. Winter wind is a great 
joker. He giggles much. He is inebriated when 
people are afraid of him. He blusters like a big 
bully when he dares. He likes to swagger when 
passengers of the outdoors are namby-pamby and 
play the timorous rabbit with him; but like him, 
be unafraid, understand him, and he is affable as 
a sailor fresh in port. What times we can have 
with the winter wind if we know how to take him. 
His voice is boisterous as if he were accustomed 
to talking to the deaf, but has whole skies of 
music in it. His manners are rude, but yet man- 
nerly if you read his book of etiquette. If a body 
schools himself to enjoy winter, it is a season 
plethoric in delight. Earth loves it. 

Rabbits know a thing. How they rollic in 
winter woods and fields! Have you seen them 
in moonlight of snowy nights .^^ No.^ My friend, 
you are greatly to be blamed. Rabbits could 
teach most people the hilarity of winter. They 
do not fuss at the cold; they do not stay in of 
nights; they do not muffle up; they do not wipe 
the frost' from their whiskers and blaspheme at 
the weather man. They carouse in the woods; 



28 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

snows and glistening frosts and nipping winter 
breath call to them out loud. Have you gone 
out of early morning into the winter woods and 
across winter fields just for the fun of seeing how 
in the night the rabbit danced the Virginia reel 
and the "quintillion"? Did you never? And 
have you no sense of fitness nor of shame? To 
see the morning fields fairly littered up with the 
rabbit tracks where for sheer delight of happy 
hearts these timorous beasties danced jigs over 
all the fields, delirious in delight — this I think 
would convert any sane body to love of winter. For 
myself I confess to feeling like the rabbits when 
winter comes. But for being pious I would not put 
it past me to dance. But I run and shout and re- 
joice in the storm and call with the winds and regale 
me on the storm when the wild winds try to push 
me from the road and cannot do it. And to hear 
and see the forest take delight in the wrath of the 
tempests and hear the deep diapason of huge trees 
buffeting with huge winds — friend, that is fine. 

Winter is life to body and spirit. Nothing 
dyspeptic can winter tolerate. When winter 
brawls you feel constrained to brawl a little your- 
self. You must walk fast or be frozen, and this 
alternative is good for the heart. However ef- 
feminate your spirit, you cannot quite escape the 
rhapsody of the winter wrath. 

This is the season of strength. Brawniness be- 
comes you. Large moods seem fitting. Winter 
is a lesson against whimpering. A naked world 



THE JOY OF WINTER 29 

not aching in the cold but rollicking in it and 
with it, is a lesson in enduring hardness. Com- 
plaints ought at this season to freeze on the lips. 
Let sleigh bells jingle; let the wolf lope across the 
sullen fields of snowy nights; let the recluse owl 
hoot as he goes about like a surly housewife get- 
ting supper ready; let the icy branches crack in 
the frosty air like riflemen at practice; let the 
bittersweet berries hang like garnets coated 
with frost; let the mobile river turn to stable 
shore where skaters may hold festival; let the 
cattle gather with their trustful eyes waiting for 
supper and the dark, making no complaint at 
anything for anybody. Watch the chickens as 
they set themselves to obeying the ten com- 
mandments for chickens — "Early to bed and 
early to rise"; see the mannish rooster bluster 
around among his silly brood of wives; hear the 
hens remark blithely, "I will lay an egg to- 
morrow"; hear at night the watch dog's bark — 
faithfulness finding a voice; hear the boom of 
waves on the lake shore and the crash of ice. 
Acclimate your soul to winter and you will be 
inclined to draft resolutions of sympathy for 
all who have no winter season. 

And in winter the world looks so big. In sum- 
mer the green world makes no vivid denial of 
the blue sky, but an ermine world has distinct 
controversy with the sapphire sky with the 
result that the world stretches very, very far. 
It seems not the same world as in summer. 



30 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

It has grown spacious. The shore line of the 
sky has been buffeted back by the winter storm- 
winds. The wide, bleak landscape across which 
are farmhouses and herds of cattle and the slow, 
homelike curl of house smoke, minding you of 
dinner or supper coming on and making you 
sniff to smell the brewing coffee and listen for 
the frying meat; and the flocks of trees flocking 
in their hollows or standing back on the hills 
against the snowy background of far fields, and 
the thatched huts of the haystacks and the spire 
of the village church and the running of the va- 
grant stream — ^look at such a landscape tending 
slowly toward the sky but going so far before reach- 
ing it, and your world will seem to have been am- 
plified by the handicraft of winter. Earth cuts 
large figure when winter goes barehanded out to 
chop wood for the fire of winter hearths. 

How good the outdoors makes the indoors in 
winter, too! Summer makes indoors "stale, 
flat, unprofitable," as good Will Shakespeare was 
heard to say on occasion. Not so, winter. In- 
doors and outdoors both are good. Winter 
frosts his whiskers with his breath. When night 
winds howl like dervishes, how good to throw 
fuel on the Gre, sit close hugging round in a 
circle of those you love the most, crack walnuts 
grown on yoiu* own woods if you have the woods, 
hear the wood crackle and see the flames leap 
chimneyward as eager to go gadding about in 
the winter sky. And this indoor comfort is 



THE JOY OF WINTER 31 

accentuated by the tempest outside. To this 
indoor comfort does Whittier's idyl, "Snow- 
bound," owe its enticements. Outside, the wild 
wind furious for journey, the melancholy moan- 
ing in the chimney or at the window sill, and the 
fierce shrieking in the resistful trees; inside, the 
calm like the calm of God, love and each other, 
and the snatch of song and the quick jest and 
the multitudinous laughter, and after all, the 
folding of the hands to pray to the good God 
of winter's storm and heart's-ease — this is like 
winter and summer joined into one to make 
an evening of divergent yet perfect delight. 

The winter snows bank high and work arabesques 
and carven work of Pentelic beauty and snows 
shape into curves such as only quaint Giotto knew 
to make, and hills and valleys such as God dwells 
in else he had not made so many. Frieze and me- 
tope, staircase and arched work and ribband work 
of cloud whiteness and cloud daintiness, and the 
wind raging like a mad lion yet creating all the while 
those things rhythmical as poetry — so winter doth. 

Brave winter, brawny winter, ruddy-cheeked 
winter with eyebrows white with frost and chin 
icicled like roof eaves, winter with blustering 
manners but a manly heart going on all fields 
as to trample life from their breasts, but in sober 
and inspiring truth trampling with frozen feet 
the field's breast into fertility and harvests 
yellow as old gold — winter, let all such as love 
things mighty love thee now and love thee ever! 



ON MY FIRST FINDING TRAILING 
ARBUTUS 

HOWEVER old a friend any wild flower 
may be, the coming on it is at each time 
a discovery. You cannot think it old and 
much less can you feel it old. It is a new thing 
under the sun. And if this is how we feel with a 
flower long known, how shall we feel when we find 
a flower of which poets have dreamed without 
weariness, whose poetry is perennial — and find 
it for the first time.^ My necessities of livelihood 
had kept me in zones not frequented by the 
trailing arbutus, so that when I was foot loose 
on long wandering in those belts where the faint 
yet pungent perfume of this flower of advent 
has its home, it was long past the time of its 
blooming. Its trail of clumsy vine and its pres- 
sure of coarse, thick leaf I had often seen lying 
sprawling close against the ground, but the 
flowering of it was to me a thing of faith. I saw 
through the poet's eyes and inhaled perfume 
through the poet's verses, and the "May flower," 
so far as visible bloom on the wildwood floor 
where it bloomed into beatitude, was remote 
as a myth. 

32 



FINDING TRAILING ARBUTUS 33 

The flower I had seen; for friends of mine, 
knowing my wistfulness for the trailing arbutus 
at flower, had many a time sent me nosegays of 
it, so that its look I knew and its odor I had in- 
haled; but those relations were not sufficient to 
satisfy the poetry of things. Moss sent in a box 
or seen in a basket is moss truly, but moss dis- 
figured because unrelated. To see moss you 
must see it set on its bank where it makes its 
own forests and constructs its own wilderness 
and grows its own boscage. You cannot ex- 
plain moss nor catch its altogether inexplicable 
wonder except to lie down on its sward and 
scrutinize its tracery and calm where never winds 
blow loudly nor wildly but where forever rests 
the quiet as of a bird's folded wing for sleep. 
No sample is to be accounted moss. 

Thus is the trailing arbutus. Where it grows 
and as it grows it must be met with. The sur- 
prise of finding must mingle with its delicate 
odor and beauty. Detached from where it 
roots and dreams of earliest springtime and ad- 
ventures forth first of the flowering hosts, it is 
more than lost. This wild flower is growing 
rarer year by year, more is the pity seeing it 
has commercial uses, and those who gather 
it for money and not for love have scant sense 
of the to-morrow but drag it from the mold as 
corsairs might, and so wrench root and all and 
so a flower has come to its funeral. Flowers 
sorrow not to be gathered. They were meant 



34 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

for the blossoming, and care not who gathers 
them, child or woman or man or God. They 
have bloomed — that is at once their task and 
poetry. What happens and who happens as the 
gatherer they give no heed to. They have 
bloomed. But to uproot them is murder. 

In New Hampshire mine host, a man of grace 
and one not lost to wonder, took me out along 
the pine woods' paths, along the stream when 
catkins hung in profusion on the white poplars; 
and we found where the trailing arbutus was 
at bud. Spring was barely come, if come at all, 
but the arbutus was a-wearying for the day- 
light and the spring light and would not wait — 
could not wait — and was holding up its clustered 
buds with a wistfulness that ached its way into 
a man's heart. What in any wise can be more 
touched with the infinite than flowers reaching 
toward blossoming? Who taught them spring 
was come? Why should they not lie still and 
low as they have months, long months past? 
And they do not. That is their mystery and 
their eternal poetry. And so I saw the buds 
of the arbutus scentless as the rocks among 
which they were attempting bloom; and I, poor 
traveler, must move on. I could not wait. Du- 
ties called and the tarrying of the May flower 
meant its birthday should not have me for one 
of the jubilant company, witnessers of its birth. 

Then I came to Maine where only the swamp 
maples hold a hint of spring. They burned like 



FINDING TRAILING ARBUTUS 35 

sunset. But no leaf hinted strongly at bud. 
The wind was sharp. The sea was near. From 
where we hunted the arbutus the sea was blue 
against the scene. The pines were moaning 
with the wanderings of winds fresh from their 
wanderings on the windy sea. \Miat poetries 
are in pines and music wooed from them by 
sea winds! And here we men, a little company 
of watchers for the spring dawn, hunted the 
trailing arbutus if peradventure it might be at 
flower. The skies were dull: the evening was 
not far away; the seas sung in the pinetops; the 
granite bowlders lay careless whether spring 
came or whether flowers ever bloomed. 

We hunted in ones, every man going his own 
way if so be there should come to him alone the 
miracle of the first scent and sea-shell tint of 
this earliest flower which has set all the New 
England bards at song. The leaves of oak trees 
which mixed with the pines covered the ground 
thick with their brown loveliness which all 
lovers of the woods count one of the mercies 
of the forest; and there where the leaves gathered 
thick and covered the earth so that not a spot 
of earth looked through, against a bowlder 
unscathed with years, I found the arbutus — the 
trailing arbutus at flower. 

The scent was scarcely appreciable, the blos- 
soms were so few and the flowers were barely 
visible, so hid beneath their coverlet of leaves; 
but O, the advent of it and the miracle of those 



36 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

first wanderers forth to beckon to the spring! 
My heart sang out loud; and through the pine 
woods and the naked oaks I called, "Found! 
found!" I sat down and then sprawled on the 
leaves under whose grace of covert the arbutus 
grew and watched the wan faces of the earliest 
flowers. How gentle the perfume, how blushing 
pale the bloom! Through the dull anger of the 
unangry leaves of oak came the calm scent lifted 
from the quiet flower and I pulled the leaves 
aside and in their still underworld smiled the 
wistful flower of the daydawn of the year — 
smiling like an awakening dream, unafraid of sur- 
prise, vital but not discontented, only arrived at 
perfume and at flower — the trailing arbutus, 
first breaker of the winter's reign, calm, blessed 
witnesser of spring and the regality of bloom. 
I, born far from these zones of bloom, had seen 
the trailing arbutus neglectful of winter and his 
reign and wrath, and wistful for the spring and 
harbinger of the thing it was wistful for. 

And yonder was the sea and here the flower; 
and which was greater marvel, none knew save 
God; and God held his peace. 



VI 

EN ROUTE THROUGH PARADISE 

YOU, fond reader, think this a misprint for 
"En Route to Paradise." You think this 
article was penciled by this writer and you 
have heard the envious say that his chirography 
lacked excellence and legibility. Envy always 
does make itself evident when one man can write 
with a hand which Spencerian copy books would 
like to have employed in writing their copies. 
But, friend, this article was written on a type- 
writer, and is absolutely legible even to the 
envious. A ride through and not to paradise is 
what is talked of in this essay. 

This is an episode of a railroad track. Not 
what was seen on the far-off fringe of fields and 
sky, but what was seen between the wire fences 
which with their barbs mildly suggested that 
this breadth of ground on either side the rails 
for a rod or two belongs to the road which pays 
taxes on the chance to run through this region. 
Since writing "A Walk Along a Railroad in 
June" some years agone, I have had no occasion 
to change my mind as told there. Specially in 
prairie places, the railroad redeems and estab- 
lishes the regime which but for it has all but 

37 



38 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

utterly vanished from the earth. A prairie cannot 
be conserved in its wild wealth of beauty save 
where it is defended alike from the share of the 
plow and the cattle herd. There only the wild 
flowers spring and flutter like banners of an 
imaginary pageant and all the wild wonder of 
prairie growth has its way and wakens infinite 
wonder in such as care to see. 

The journey was on the Chicago and Alton 
Railroad running from Saint Louis to Chicago. 

The train was a flyer, and well named. It 
tarried not. I wish it had. But I would have 
trains stopping all the time if I were conductor 
on prairies these days of radiant spring. Trains 
never would arrive on schedule time. They 
might start by schedule, but they would pro- 
ceed by a series of stops. Spring is so brief 
that to lose a minute of its bewildering career 
impresses me as a crime against the eternal 
beauty of the world. Well for the traveling 
public I am no conductor; I am a conducted. 
So we sped along. Things flung past me as in 
high dudgeon. Sometimes what was rushing by 
I could not make out. My eyes were not in- 
stantaneous. I made a rush to the window, as 
it were, but the couple had gotten past before 
I could make out who they were. It was a 
festival of color and shimmer and glancing 
lamps of many-colored flame. Used to the en- 
trancement of the spring, yet all was new as 



EN ROUTE THROUGH PARADISE 39 

youth and as glad. Along the road the grass 
was vivid beyond compare. Anything looks 
lovely set down against such wonderful greenery 
as prairie grass. And I saw along our receding 
path dandelions and elders at bloom and wild 
dwarf roses worthy of the name the Indians gave 
them — a wild rose they named ''shonna" which 
is as sweet as the wild rose itself; say no more 
for the sweetness of the name — glowing caval- 
cades of spider wort of unfathomable blue; wild 
mustard with its swift yellow like a glancing 
light; early thistles clad in their antagonistic 
foliage, beautiful as tracery on a winter pane; 
wild parsnip in wealth of bloom and bounty of 
multitude and clad in old gold in clumps and 
ribbands and thickets, but all wealth like a cap- 
tured argosy; and yellow sheep sorrel and muddy 
waters where the frogs are jubilantly singing by 
daylight; and white mock asters all a-nod in the 
wind, women asters nodding their heads as in talk- 
ing; wild prairie phlox wildly crimson, and some 
pinkish, and others drowsing away toward sleepy 
blue; and some yellow bloom shaped like unto 
a primrose, whose name I could not give in the 
rush of passing, and it was standing tall against 
the wind, swinging like a wild canary on a wind- 
blown stalk; and the compass plant in fronds of 
extravagant witchery; and beside, wheat fields 
ripening a very little but splotched, and shadows 
which the wind made in the whirl across the 
yielding grain; flowers in white and sometimes 



40 WITH EAKTH AND SKY 

tinted with dim blue, distant blue, like lilies in a 
river of green; Indian arrows brown as their wont 
is but at rare flowers red as if they were fresh 
drawn from some deep wound; and then a blos- 
som, deep yellow like a buttercup and yet larger 
of flower but whose identity escaped me, for the 
train was so swift and refused to stop amid fields 
but panted a little at stations where nothing was 
to be seen. Long pools of muddy water were 
here and there, in evidence where marsh grasses 
and reeds and cattails were indolently growing, 
and then once I saw a vivid crimson like a lily 
wounded and bleeding nigh to death. I could 
not tell what it was. 

I had great mind to pull the rope and set the 
air and stop the train a spell; but it does beat 
all how although a passenger has paid his fare 
and has beside purchased a seat in the parlor 
car, he is not at liberty to run the train. Here 
is a thing, a definite evil under the sun, which 
the many tinkerers with the railroad bill should 
have included by way of amendment if not in 
original draft. It would have been much wiser 
than much which was included. But here was 
a passenger without the simple, elementary right 
to pull the rope and stop the train to get a full- 
face look at a prairie flower so as to be able to 
name it. Such are the infelicities of travel in 
civilized countries. Had I been journeying in 
a rickshaw, phantom or real, I could have stopped 



EN ROUTE THROUGH PARADISE 41 

and fed my fancy ?jv^ have decreased my ig- 
norance. Back to baibrtrism as Rousseau would 
have us, with a rusJi ^here there was abundant 
leisure to do every '>jng but work, and where 
slow locomotion is a'J the locomotion there is, 
and where there is nice dirt long retained and 
where soap is not among the means of grace 
used nor any love of hill crest nor bloom nor 
wealth of growing maize. Back to barbarism, 
for then could I have tarried with the flower; 
but then in good barbaric days I would not have 
noted the flower nor cared for it had I noticed; 
so peace to thy querulous spirit. Brother Quayle. 
Better the civilization which loves the flower 
of the field as God, who set it blooming, loves it; 
better the swift train than the barbaric opaque- 
ness to loveliness and infinite leisure used to no 
high purpose, dr<^amful purpose. 

We dare not pull the air cord and we cannot 
alight from the speeding train gracefully when 
we are going fifty miles an hour. It has been 
tried but has not been really successful. But I 
would give a "purty" to know the name that 
tossing, teasing, crimson flower loved to be 
called by. Then the wild tansy stood with its 
creamy bloom. Once in a while on the rail- 
road wire fence a post was festooned by wild ivy, 
and sometimes the barbed wires were redeemed 
from their antagonism by wandering wild grape 
vines with their tendrils and leaf and musk 
perfume of delayed blossoms. Wild elephant's 



42 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

ears were being tweaked by the wind and did 
not resent the famiHarity; and sometimes there 
was a dirty stream and betimes dirty boys with 
primitive fishing tackle and primitive delight — 
and I was whipped past before the cork bobbed! 



I will pull this rope and stop this train! I 
cannot let all the fun escape in consideration for 
being thrown bodily from the train by the con- 
ductor. And, come to think of it, he could not 
do it. I am here, myself. The conductor is 
baldheaded. Shall a baldheaded man eject me? 
Nay, verily. But he can get the brakesman to 
help him and the porter beside; and my ticket 
is paid for and only good for this train. I would 
not mind being put off if it took three men to 
do it and be put off in the midst of this June 
greenery and blossoming, but cannot afford to 
lose my ticket. I will not pull the cord now. 
Thus ever do our petty economies rob life of 
its freedom and spontaneity. I am bom too late. 
The pocketbook controls me and derides me. 
I am the serf of the nickel. Unafraid am I of 
porter and brakesman and conductor. Three 
men might put me off, but the fracas would be 
interesting and I would be no spectator. Yes, 
I have a mind to pull the bell rope and invite 
the scrap. But the nickel subdues me. I must 
not have this ticket canceled. And so I do not 
see the cork bob. This is at once the irony and 



EN ROUTE THROUGH PARADISE 43 

tyranny of cash. The complaisant nickel hobbles 
a man as if he were a horse. 

Recent rains have poured the ditches of the 
roadside full. If it were only night a thousand 
frog serenades would fill the air. I wish it were 
night. 'Tis worth being auditor when a frog 
holds the guitar and tunes it to the muscles of 
his throat. 

The clouds are indolent and far aloft. The 
wind is a ground wind and tosses the wheat 
fields and the lush green and the every wild 
flower into a perfect highland fling; but the sky 
winds are asleep and the clouds are at rest. 
They are mainly formless — unshapen like a haze. 
They are moody clouds through which the sun 
shines in a smileless way. The sky is restful; 
so is the sunlight. No glare is on the outlook. 
You could scarcely accumulate a freckle if you 
went fishing. A sleepy sky but never a bit of 
a sleepy day. The day is wide awake. The 
flowers and woods and the grass are all mad 
with joy. 

The wind is wide awake; the June wonder is 
wide awake; clouds are fast asleep. En route 
through paradise! "O paradise, O paradise, 
who doth not long for thee.?" 



VII 

A MADRIGAL OF THE NIGHT 

THERE had been long and hungry drought. 
Rain had come by promise, rather than ful- 
fillment, the skies clouding up with furious 
haste which promised bounteous downpour and 
the promise proving a Falstaffian veracity. No 
rain, just drought and the withered corn forcing 
itself toward withered tasseling. The afternoon 
had furnished its riot of promissory rain and had, 
as in a spirit of repentance, supplied a few drops, 
just enough to give the ground the blessed smell 
which intoxicates lovers of the country ways. 
And I landed at a station where I had not 
been before and cannot say I care to be again, 
save as there was night there and silence and the 
dome of the sky. I was waiting to be carted 
across lots to a town on a neighboring railroad. 
I was not in haste. I was not worried. I was 
alone and in the gathering night; and the clouds 
hung in solace of unfulfilled benediction. I 
walked up and down the little tract of ground 
allotted me by the waiting for the cart and the 
carting. The gloaming was sweet with the 
dust-breath subdued and sweetened by the rain. 
Not a voice of any living thing was abroad in 

44 



A MADRIGAL OF THE NIGHT 45 

the night save the happy sound of youth laughter 
where a pack of boy-men had congregated in the 
Httle telegraph office to talk a spell; and the 
guffaws of boy laughter with boys came shout- 
ing out of the little dim-lit windows like a gale 
of music to me, for what has more blessing than 
the laughter of the happy hearts; of happy folks 
whom God has blessed with the holy gift of 
laughter? 

Happy human voices never intrude on any 
melody this world has in waiting for such as 
love its abundant tunefulness. 

So the voices wafted from the little dim sta- 
tion; and, besides, the wind was whist, and the 
skies drew closer and more friendly, and I waited 
for the sound of horses' hoofs pounding an age- 
long rune in the dark. Stillness there, and 
nothing more. The breath of the vanished rain 
and the fickle promise of clouds which had been 
torn into windows through which stars gleamed 
with their lights, and I, a traveler from every- 
where intent on everything which God has for 
distribution to those who wait at his table think- 
ing to catch a crumb. The stars were far and 
high; and the clouds were near and stern; and 
I was walking through star-lamp hght and drowsy- 
shadowed cloud and waiting. For the cart.? Not 
altogether. Mostly for the wonder of the world. 
For am I not always waiting for the wonder of 
the world.? That is who I am, if any foolish 
body cared to know. The waiter for the wonder 



46 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

of the world. Never for a minute since first I 
guessed in earnest that this world was God's 
have I been other than knowing that if things 
belonged to God no moment could be free from 
the invasion of wonder. 

So there, in the cleansing night with the com- 
passion of the rain near at hand, I heard a meadow- 
lark give one lilt, one sudden gust of laughter 
in the dark. How my heart lifted to the wonder 
and the beauty of it! All my days of loving the 
meadow lark I had never heard a song from its 
bonny throat after dark. I had heard it toss a 
good-night kiss of song out as the sun was setting 
or lately set. But to hear him sing at night — 
that never. I wonder if it was dreaming. Maybe 
with head under sleepy wing, into its sunlit breast 
came a ripple as of swaying grasses or a rush 
as of summer wind and the sleepy bird thought 
it must be day. But I heard him sing! The 
song was no dream. I was wide awake, what- 
ever the lark was. Just one blowing of its silver 
flute, one dream flung into the sky among the 
stars unaccustomed to its song — that was it and 
that was all. I waited long for one more wistful 
spread of song-wing in the dark but in vain. 
That voice once; and then that voice no more. 
It was dreaming .^^ 

Or perchance it was a bird on its nest packed 
full of feeble little folks who twittered a fear in 
the darkness and the song was meant to allay 
bird-fears, "night-fears," of birdie folk not yet 



A MADRIGAL OF THE NIGHT 47 

accustomed to our dark. What a sweet com- 
fort that voice of song should have been to 
little fearful nestlings! Cheer would have caressed 
them into quiet after that. Like a mother sooth- 
ing her little bird at night when in the dark, 
the little lad or lassie would wail out in sudden 
fear to be caressed into an unspeakable calm 
and quiet by a mother lullaby. "Hush, my 
dear. Lie still and slumber. Holy angels guard 
thy bed"; and for such a soothing song a baby 
might be glad enough to stumble into painful 
wakefulness. I, a man grown and coming toward 
life's yellow leaf, would have a hundred thousand 
heartaches if I might just be soothed by such 
a swift and dear compassion as my mother's 
lullaby. The night song of the lark, was a mother 
lullaby? Maybe. We cannot tell. 

It may have been a bird in love and thought 
itself singing to its lady in the morning when 
the day was young. Maybe the raindrops on 
its nest and on its yellow breast, it took for 
dew and so sang out one swift and tuneful word 
— "Morning." 

But whatever caused the song, I, a man of 
the longing heart, heard it and stored it away 
in the shadow spaces of my heart, where dwell 
the innumerable company of memories sweet as 
dawn and lovely as blooming flax swayed in the 
noon-time wind. 



vm 

A SURPRISE OF THE DESERT 

I WAS in the desert and alone. I had taken 
a faint trail outward, I knew not where nor 
cared. And then that trail had vanished, but 
not the desert. The hot desert was everywhere. 
It stretched its lazy length on and on. How the 
desert which seems so otiose can travel un- 
weariedly so very far is beyond a body's capacity 
to understand, but certain it is the desert is 
very far-going. Its indolence does not keep it 
at home. It travels far and many whithers. 

I never murmur at the desert. Truth to say, 
I love it and laugh out loud on its wide, witless 
uncompanioned stretches. It is the lungs of a 
continent. A continent without a desert would 
be a disquahfied continent. "Clean-breathed as 
the desert" — no word can be added to that. 
The desert is brewing clean air for a continent 
to breathe. What a glorious vocation! And 
I am pilgrim on this same desert and, what is 
more, a pilgrim with a song. 

The day burnt hot and the desert path was 
nigh molten; but the desert air was an intox- 
ication. I walked as in a dream, a happy albeit 
a sweaty dream. The Sahara and I had become 

48 



A SURPRISE OF THE DESERT 49 

friends. The desert and I — alone. Not a hab- 
itation, not an inhabitant, not a wandering sheep 
nor the sign by track or visibihty of any cattle 
herd, just a tawny desert from which at inter- 
vals grew black, stunted pines, things meant 
for the sky but which had not arrived at their 
destination nor could ever arrive. The desert 
kept rocks against its hot breast to bungle at 
making a little shadow. No touch of verdure 
anywhere. Russian thistles which had been 
green once were now dried into perpetual anger 
and sought to nip you like an angry cur. Just 
desert. And to the far off, yet friendly moun- 
tains, is there nothing at bloom.? Why no, 
certainly not. There was nothing to bloom. 
How shall dead plants burst into flower .^^ How 
shall the sterile desert bloom.? "The wilder- 
ness and the solitary place — shall blossom" 
maybe, but not this "wilderness and solitary 
place." So am I wanderer, glorious vagabond 
of the desert and with compass lost. All silent. 
Not a bird chirp, not a chipmunk's cracked 
laughter, not a desert hawk flinging temporary 
shadow on the burning spaciousness. Just a 
desert and a man afoot — and very glad and with 
a heart at song, wild song, a lover of the ruth- 
less desert, a dreamer wandering where God had 
often wandered before. 

So I slouched along. Nothing hurried. De- 
laying, dallying, only dallying, enjoying, wander- 
ing heart-deep into leagues high of desert blue 



50 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

of sky, lounging along tawny footpaths where 
no foot fall was, wandering amidst perpetuated 
drought where the clouds all but always shammed 
rain and where rains were fenced out by in- 
credible hedges of eternal mountains, a leisurer 
on the desert where "many ana" seized his feet 
and his dreams and the lotus lily grew on Niles 
of blistering sand and he had inhaled its nepenthe. 
A desert and the domed sky and the haughty 
mountains, aristocrats of the sky, at far removes 
and the smoking wastes of the unwaterable plains, 
and one man who loved it all and craved it all 
and was wistful in it, and whose soul, more than 
half ashamed, sometimes whispered, "Let us 
never go hence." 

But we shall find no posy this day. Nature 
will accord us no nosegay of the desert. We 
shall wear the splendor of the sky for a purple 
cloak and inhale the sage brush perfume for our 
mignonette. We need no posy. We have our 
share and more. Would a body on the wide 
and rippling sea murmur because he could not 
gather roses there .^^ I think not. But this is 
God's sea. His inland sea, God's sea of sand — 
all shore — where sands answer to the coming 
and the going of the winds. 

So am I calm and indolently glad and strangely 
and infinitely refreshed by this desert. 

What shall be said for a man who knows no 
more than to enjoy everything.^ Everything.? 
We must stand him on the dunce's stool and bid 



A SURPRISE OF THE DESERT 51 

him wear the dunce's cap. But, coming to think 
on it, to such dunces the stool and cap would 
be a supererogation. Let us economize on dunce 
caps. Let us grow eager in the desert nor cog- 
itate on follies or wisdoms. There is time 
enough for that when the desert is faint as a 
day dawn seen in childhood. And the day was 
here and the desert wanderings and the curling 
heat: and the dunce was abroad and no one 
near to hector him. So mote be it. 

An arroyo came to a sudden, abrupt head, 
blunt like the prow of an ocean freighter. It 
was cut out of the desert as by an ax, hacked 
down ruthlessly and with scant economy; for 
what is land worth to nature, desert land in 
particular? and a gash was made beyond the 
heahng. Just a dull adobe wall built for no 
reason, staying for no reason, reasonless as the 
rest of the desert. 

And at the verge where the arroyo took its 
inartistic and unnecessary start, within a three 
inches space of the leap off, a bunch of purple 
aster stood in radiant flower! Had I found a 
wild rose growing mid-sea, I think I had not 
been whipped into wider surprise. A purple 
aster always makes me wonder. I see them, 
see them and want to see them still. Were I 
administering the out-of-doors, I would make 
the purple asters perennials. I should wish God 
might choose to grow them for an amaranth in 
his heaven for our earthlj^ immortelle. The blue 



52 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

of the sky and the wonder of moonhght com- 
mingled, that is the purple aster. 

Here in the desert's heart and at the crude 
arroyo's brink where nothing was growing nor 
any green thing gave hint of blossoming, this 
purple aster trimmed its lovely lamps like love 
lights at a casement. \Miat cared this flower 
though the brink of doom was at hand or that 
the desert was at burning noon.^^ It was sweetly 
careless of all this. It was in the bliss of self- 
realization. It was at its sunrise, what cared it 
whose day was hot and sultry as furnace breath .^^ 

Not an imperfectly shaped flower in all the 
cluster. I sat close and looked the blossom 
straight in the face. But it had bloomed for 
God to see. I was an intruder in its room. And 
it watched on, looking only at God. 

And I left it. Did I pluck one flower .^^ Nay, 
friend, I am no vandal. I am a man. Where 
it grew, I left it growing, its purple stars all 
risen and shining. I am a wanderer in the desert: 
it is dweller in the desert but scarcely of it. 

The purple mountains lifted rank on rank 
afar and noble as a noble dream: and the purple 
flowers with watching through many days and 
the remote purple mountains had learned their 
splendor by heart .^ Who knows? 

I see the solemn purple mountains over the 
drowsy desert now, the light unspeakable of the 
sands and skies now, and the tiny clustering 
purple asters, growing in the desert now. 



IX 

I HEARD A BLUE BIRD 

TIE time is midwinter: the place is Quayle- 
cliff. A deeper snow blanketed the ground 
than had been known in many years. The 
snows lay knee-deep on the level and were drifted 
gloriously. Far as the eye can compass, the 
landscape is uninterrupted whiteness, and under 
the sun is white and ghstening as an angel's 
apparel. On the south side of the house and 
barn, though the sun shines his best without 
a veil of cloud to temper his radiancy, not a 
show of thaw is on the ground nor a drip of 
icicle on the eves. It is bitter cold. The test 
thermometer registers eighteen below, which is 
weather for Kansas. On the hill where we are 
cooking our midday meal, our wood fire does not 
thaw the snow on the ends of the burning logs. 
Heat seems not to radiate. Winter is holding 
forth. This would be dignified cold anywhere. 
Ears are an impertinence in this frigidity. They 
are too numerous for one thing, and then they 
will stick out, and the frost makes merry with 
them. A nose is bad enough, but there is but 
one of him. "Wintry" is what the neighbors 
remark as they pass each other wrapped like 
Icelanders. 

5$ 



54 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

My friend and I are camping out, as our 
custom is, without regard for weather. We do 
not furnish weather but applaud it of whatsoever 
sort it is. Rain, shine, summer, winter, fall, 
spring, night, day, nipping frost, perfervid heat 
— ^none of these things move us. We are imper- 
vious to climate, or possibly it were better to 
say we are encorers of climates. All weather 
pleases us. We are humble folk like the conies, 
and all we ever have the intrepidity to demand 
is some kind of weather. This demand appears 
to us as rational and religious. And after happy 
years weathering it we report that God has 
always given us weather. Some are critical of 
the climatic conditions: they dictate terms to 
the elements. To us two men who are humble 
belongers to the proletariat of mankind, that 
seems preposterous. To Emerson's "Give me 
health and a day and I will make the pomp of 
emperors ridiculous," we vagabonds of the fields 
add "Weather," so that the wealth we pray 
for is, "Health and a day and some weather." 
And we always get some weather. In the winter 
the light is briefer; in summer, longer, but dark- 
ness ekes out the light one way or another, so 
we always get a day; and we always get "a 
weather." What odds whether the weather be 
dark or light, cold or hot, full of song of birds 
or trumpeted full of angry voices of warring 
winds? That is not our concern. The con- 
cert that nature furnishes, seeing it is gratis. 



I HEARD A BLUE BIRD 55 

we cannot in common good manners prescribe, 
since we listen to it and applaud and give a rugged 
encore. We have spent night and day with 
rain pouring on us and even sousing on us, with 
every thread of garment qualified for a clothes 
wringer; we have been out in scorching Julys in 
this open when you could have set fire to this 
visible part of the open by scratching a match 
against the sandal of nature. But all seasons 
and degrees of humidity or heat please us. We 
absolve the weather and pick no quarrel. We 
have our share; and a day has ever been ours 
to riot in and bless God for at the falling of the 
shadows or the waking from the dark. Of weather 
we have had some at every turn of our road and 
of health have had enough so that we were in 
general nearer well than sick so that to the 
neighborly colloquialism, "How are you to-day.?" 
we could reply with alacrity, "Well, thank you 
and the Lord." Quarreling with the weather 
we think to be unjustifiable loquacity. The 
weather does not mind. It has its mind made 
up and refuses to change and cannot be bullied, 
so where is the use.'^ What philosophers we two 
be, though I will exonerate us from being so by 
intention! We are simply children of the sun, 
and like the open, where the day is born in 
purple splendor and where the day sails high 
across a heaven it loves and owns. Fussing at 
weather accentuates its peculiarity, whatever that 
may be. Hot weather is never cooled off by 



56 V/ITH EARTH AND SKY 

fussing, but, rather, heated thereby. Whether 
fanning creates more heat in me than it invites 
coolness out of me is a proposition on which I 
am still agnostic. Yet am I of a confident mind 
that drubbing the weather is retroactive. It 
kicks back "awful." Cold days were never 
warmed by an inhabitant getting mad. That 
kind of heat does not modify the temperature. 
Better slap your hands or cavort with your feet. 

So winter at its wildest bids this two of us 
out to my hill to luxuriate in its winter passion. 

The cornfield tented over with the shocks of 
corn^ as you might discern in the picture taken 
with freezing fingers on this identical winter day, 
has never a rabbit track on it, nor a fussy tod- 
dling of a field mouse. Across it has passed the 
scythe of the icy wind and cut everything to a 
common level. The snow is rioting in every 
breath the wind draws. The storm is bonny. 
Every nose is an inconvenience, for the weather 
tweaks it in a jocular way which, while neigh- 
borly, is a little too famihar. Where the rabbits 
are is a mystery, but they are not around here. 
I have played circuit rider going around this 
farm from Dan to Beersheba and never a rabbit 
nor a rabbit track. Maybe they have been 
drinking nepenthe, as Mr. Poe advised, or maybe 
they have taken to hibernation, mistaking this 
for arctic climate. A crow occasionally plunges 
through the sky intent on going somewhere or 
(lives down to make free with a corn shock he 



I HEARD A BLrE BIRD 57 

did not build nor grow. ''Chickadees chic and 
dee-dee alertly but only a lew of them. The 
fact is that we two campers-out are about the 
only inhabitants of this hill. Certainly we are 
the only ones that clearly enjoy it. And we do. 
We are in our eleme/it. 

We have seized the highest hill hereabouts 
and are industriously building our camp fire. 
The wind is hig!) and is plainly carousinj^. The 
trees on my liiil-crest are filled with ixii savage 
minstrelsy- Snow leaps into the sky in aerial 
gymnastics. The boughs bend and rejoice in 
the riot of which they find themselves a part. 
In a word, we are enshrined in music. The glee 
is on Us as on the woods; and the storm has found 
in us congenial spirits. And what we living 
things lack in numbers we make up in ruddy 
joy. We swing the ax, we drag or pack the 
fallen trees, we pile the logs on the wind-swept 
hill, and we are getting hungry, and the steak 
is frozen which we brought for cooking. We 
scratch the match: we see the slow blaze scatter 
and ignite the dead twigs, the bits of bark, the 
wild locust thorns till the smoke surges in our 
faces and blinds our eyes; and the fun of the 
camp fire has begun. We shall be smoked bacon 
in due time but we shall be cured, which is more 
than can be said of many. When isn't a camp 
fire a comfort and a joy for all those who care 
for the pristine pleasures of the field.? But when 
cold weather is daggering about to hit the marrow 



58 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

in the bones, when the camp is where the wild 
roses bloomed in June, and the wild birds build 
their nests singing, and on spring nights the 
frog note fills the lingering starlight with weird 
call, testimonial of creature gladness, and in 
August heats the locust strikes his one harp- 
string with a strum which vibrates as if August 
heat had oozed into a voice, and here where my 
wild crab fills at the blooming time all this hill- 
top air with a divine perfume, here a camp fire 
is a poem. But this is January and not April 
nor August nor June nor May. 

We have a straw sack at our back built for 
fracases like this. It smells good; and the fire 
sends puflFs of genial smoke its way as with 
friendly intent to warm these aged wheat stalks. 
And the stack feels good. The north wind 
plunges at it as in pure pugnacity or as if it 
were a besieged fortress. Boom, boom, rouse the 
winds. Plainly, spring will never reach this 
winter-conquered hill. Snows spurt into the sky 
in swaying spirals, and grow jocund with the 
wind. New forms of drifts are created every 
hour. Snow buntings should be here. This is 
their weather. They are not. No bird is here 
now. The hill is solitary of every living thing 
but ourselves. The wood smoke swirls and plunges 
every whither as if loath to leave the fire. Our 
eyes smart with the smoke but love it none the 
less. Shouts of the wind grow uproarious like 
Indian raiders, when beyond all imagining and 



I HEARD A BLUE BIRD 59 

contradictory of all nature-logic, swift and sweet 
on the winter air sounds out "Ber-mu-da! 
Ber-mu-da!" 

And two men at home in the storm, yell like 
Comanches in frenzy, "A bluebird!" Truly a 
bluebird? Then doubting our ears, we listened 
as in a dream and again, "Ber-mu-da, Ber-mu-da, 
Ber-mu-da." And then three pilgrims of the 
spring, bluebirds ignoring the storm and the rage 
of the winter, came near our campfire and spake 
each to the other *'Ber-mu-da" and passed on a 
voice of music and of violets. 

And to us it was spring. 

I think that they were fooled bluebirds, and 
to all reason fool bluebirds; but their minstrelsy 
had tuned the lute anew. It was no longer 
winter on that hill, and the white earth was 
no longer white with snow but with wind-flowers 
pranking with the merry winds. Seasons had 
changed places in a moment only because we 
heard a bluebird. 

It was spring! 



THE FUN OF MAKING GARDEN 

SOME think making garden, work. They do 
err, not knowing the truth. It is fun. A 
little sweat is becomingly mingled with the 
function, but is not so much the sweat of toil 
as it is the sweat of spring fever, the beginnings 
of the session of the sun. And sweat is very 
healthy and very much needed. To take the 
collar off and tie a handkerchief about the neck 
and seize with becoming violence the south end 
of a hoe gives such an impression of importance 
that it is worth all it costs in perspiration to give 
yourself such a wholesome exhibit of yourself 
as a man of real worth and affairs. 

Beside, gardening is an antique occupation. 
More antique than any furniture on display at 
any antique store. This should ingratiate gar- 
dening with those artistic souls who dote on the 
antique and remote. Adam was a gardener, 
we read, and the rendering of the text is doubt- 
less accurate. While Adam hoed. Eve stood by 
and bossed. And if authority be demanded for 
such an assertion, seeing nothing of the sort is 
named in the text, the easy and accurate reply 
is that to have said such a thing would have 

60 



THE FUN OF MAKING GARDEN 61 

been a piece of persiflage, a work of supereroga- 
tion; for does not everybody know what a woman 
does when her spouse is making garden? She 
stands by and bosses. There is pathos in this 
suggestion, but truth cannot be denied because 
it is pathetic. So, for reasons of its antique 
and therefore classic character as well as for its 
suggestion of industry and a slight suggestion 
of vegetables, making garden should be set down 
as an occupation to be set store by. 

Have a garden. If you cannot have one on 
the ground, have a roof garden. They do not 
so well claim the fidelity of effort as those on the 
ground, but have a garden anywhere. Putter 
around; look important. Think on that worthy 
vender of truisms who remarked on the market 
value of the man who made a couple of blades 
of grass grow so that there would be two green 
things, the man and the grass. What a flood 
of sage sayings sweat out of a man when he is 
making garden! How genius seems necessary 
to his dust! 

If the man have gardened before, then he has 
all that hilarious excitement which necessarily 
comes to a man looking for the rake and the 
hoe and the spade. They are where he put 
them not last year. His wife will revile him and 
resuscitate the unpardonable incident of Job's 
wife who talked back to her husband. She will 
say with a smile which has no sunlight in it, 
**Dearie, you will presumably find the garden 



62 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

implements where you put them last year. Of 
course you know where that is." Now, a thing 
or two of that kind turns common gardening 
into a means of grace; for he who being a man, 
master of his own house (as it were) and can 
command himself and keep calm while such 
intimations refresh the air, may calmly survey 
himself in the glass when he has washed the 
honest grime of honest toil in an honest gardening 
effort, and seeing his own anatomy, say, "You 
are a good man, a very good man,'* and such a 
conclusion is very heartening to any man I have 
ever met. 

Some good men are deterred from gardening 
because there is an element of uncertainty in it. 
They think so many contingencies arise about 
the progress of events in the nurture of vegetables. 
So many things happen whether the vegetables 
happen or not. This is true but should deter 
no valorous man from the endeavor. There are 
things happen. Bugs, caterpillars, drought, frost, 
incidentals, accidentals, insagacity of seeds, mis- 
direction of effort, hoeing up the things you 
planted, not being acquainted with the real look 
of the thing you designed to grow, and saddest, 
the gardener in his pursuit of vegetation which 
intrudes on his garden purlieus (to wit, weeds), 
setting his pedal extremities on the vegetable 
in process, and many such things. These are all 
likelihoods in gardening. But would a brawny 
man retire from effort because of the uncertainty 



THE FUN OF MAKING GARDEN 63 

of conditions? Is not life full of accidentals like 
certain music? Shall we not show ourselves more 
the master of fate to fool with the garden irre- 
spective of what happens to the garden? Shall 
we ask to have the garden success insured ere 
we tackle the garden job? Be it far from us 
who are writ down "men" in the census. We 
must be up and doing, however many things are 
up and doing at the same time. 

"What would you do with your neighbor's 
chickens?" was the frivolous question once thrust 
at me by a brother who was indolent, and did 
not wish to walk the sweaty ways of gardening; 
for be it known that all the indolent dodge gar- 
dening. That is not their craft. Tom Sawyer 
junior nor Tom Sawyer senior ever wanted to 
garden for a living. The indolent have many 
subterfuges whereby to avoid the attrition of the 
hoe handle on the naked hand, which attrition is 
bound to ultimate in a blister. No blister, no 
gardening. Settle to that. That is the axiom of 
good gardening. You cannot give a garden absent 
treatment nor can you give a hoe absent treat- 
ment. A hoe is a neighborly implement and 
wants companionship. It is not select. Most 
anybody will do; but it wants somebody. Sol- 
itude has no charms for the breast of the hoe. 
To garden you must be in the garden and grip 
the hoe and make certain passes with it, which 
as so much mesmeric treatment pleases both 
garden and hoe, which will in the ordinary course 



64 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

of Providence ultimate in blisters. Blisters are 
the plural of blister, a grammatical and mathe- 
matical discrimination worthy of consideration 
and remembrance. Be callous to these observa- 
tions and you may never be a full member in the 
illustrious order of Gardeners of which Adam is 
the somewhat damaged high muck-a-muck. 

The lazy are adepts in the art of excuse. The 
saying of the wise man was that the prudent 
man seeth the danger and hideth himself. The 
aphorism of the indolent man is "The lazy man 
seeth the work and maketh an excuse." He find- 
eth cause of absence. He conjureth up reasons 
why certain lines of eflFort will in the nature of 
the case be futile and, so, an unproductive toil. 

Chickens, forsooth! Shall a few chickens de- 
feat a man of assured industry.^ Put it this 
way. Shall the man who pays the rent on his 
house abdicate headship thereof to a few chickens.'^ 
Is he chicken hearted.'^ Then are there two 
chickens, he and the other one. Your neighbor's 
chickens! what a dull man a lazy man is. His 
doctrine stops not at his hands, but slowly — 
always slowly; the lazy man never does anything 
other than slowly, "Go slow," being his motto 
— slowly lets his brain move with many a rest 
and so he seldom getteth at the truth. He is 
somewhere behind the facts, somewhere a long 
way behind them. Shall a gardener, successor of 
Adam I, fear a few chickens, and their itching 
ways offer impediment to a real gardener? But 



THE FUN OF MAKING GARDEN 65 

the slow brother given to laziness still reiterateth 
his fumbled remark, "Chickens, my neighbor's 
chickens — what shall I do with them?" There 
he standeth on one leg like a reflective chicken 
instead of scratching with both feet like an 
unsuperannuated chicken. To me who am a min- 
ister, the question seems frivolous. What do with 
the neighbor's chickens? Why, eat them. What 
but a dull brain would find a neighbor's chicken 
an impediment to gardening? Chickens facilitate 
gardening. They strengthen the gardener, and 
so help the gardenee! What is in the garden may 
safely be included as a part of the garden and 
as much planted as the lettuce or onions! And 
what is planted in the garden is the evident 
property of the gardener. 

And if this logic seem to you specious, you not 
being adept in the logic of gardening, look at 
your neighbor's chickens in your garden in an- 
other light. They are intruders. Now, what- 
ever intrudes on a garden is a weed, and a weed, 
as even a not lazy gardener knows, is to be hoed 
up. The chicken of your neighbor is a weed, 
therefore by this irresistible logic, is to be hoed 
up. When a chicken is hoed up he will return 
no more. That will end the chicken. 

Hence he or she, according to the crow or cackle, 
is not to be set down as an impediment but simply 
as a weedy incident to be overcome with the hoe. 

Or if you care to do so, take another view of 
your neighbor's chicken. It is a critter, and 



66 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

critters are to be tabooed in a garden. They 
divest it of fertility. The chicken is to be looked 
on in the nature of a potato bug. The potato 
and the bug cannot thrive simultaneously, hence 
all expert gardeners promptly kill the potato bug 
and not the potato. If the bug were not taught 
that it was mortal, the potato would succumb to 
mortality. We kill the bug in the interest of the 
potato, for gardening is not the fine art of raising 
bugs: it is the fine art of raising potatoes and 
such like edibles. To fail to kill the bug is treason 
to the potato: and gardeners must not be traitors, 
hence killing the bug is right and our bounden 
duty. By this irrefutable logic the neighbor's 
chicken is a bug and must be killed. So it will 
happen that the chicken will not trouble for long. 
He must be eliminated in the interest of the garden 
sass which may be said to own the garden. 

Now, by all these logical paths we are led to 
the same conclusion, to the elimination, i. e., 
the hoeing down of the neighbor's chicken. He 
is a weed, a bug, a hostile, and to undo him is 
due him and due the garden. A severely logical 
faculty is thus seen to be a fine gardener asset. 
This may account for my own success in this 
field of learning. 

A certain learned journal once upon a time was 
stimulated by my vaticinations on gardening to 
enter editorial demurrer. It was well done. 
That is, what was done, was as well done as a 
poor thing could be. The point made by the 



THE FUN OF MAKING GARDEN 67 

editor, if it might be dignified as a point, was 
that my contention that it was not the gar- 
dener's business to produce, but to go through 
the motions which should end in production was 
erroneous. The writer averred that it was better 
to have a garden produce, that it was more fun 
to grow things than to grow at them. An array 
of vegetables was set in view with the intent 
to incite the observer to cupidity. I cared for 
no such utilitarian logic. It scathed me not. I 
stood obdurate. I am for the art of the thing. 
To stand stolidly by and insist on a garden 
raising vegetables and hollyhocks seems to me 
the essence of selfishness. Where is the altruistic 
spirit if that be the summum honum of gardening .^^ 
Where is the poetry of the thing gone.'^ Do we not 
walk by faith .f^ and is faith not its own reward.^ 
I protest, this editor was a son of Tubal Cain 
who wanted to see sparks fly whenever he hit 
an anvil. A body's hunger will be more readily 
appeased by a potato which has grown in the 
garden than by one which has not grown. That 
is granted. But are we not told that the hungry 
are blessed.'^ I certainly have read that remark 
somewhere, and how shall we be hungry and get 
the beatitude personally applied if we raise the 
potato and eat it.'^ Now, that is logic, hoe-handle 
logic. It would dig up any editor who attempted 
to attack this writer on the art of gardening. 
We will not listen to editorial expectorations like 
this. We hold to the garden and its spirit of 



68 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

altruistic effort and poetical interpretation. A 
punkin is not the end of the punkin vine. It is 
the aftermath of the punkin flower. You cannot 
make punkin pie of the punkin bloom, but neither 
can you wear the punkin for a button-hole 
bouquet. So the aesthete in us champions the 
blossom while the dull instinctive utilitarian and 
animal insists on the pie. I stand by the flower- 
ing of the punkin vine rather than the pie-ing 
of the same vine. Now, what any punkin head 
will decide on this business will depend on the punk- 
inity of his head. I cannot loiter with him longer. 
The garden calleth and the hoe waiteth my coming. 
Hence, I bid the editor a scathing adieu and pro- 
ceed to tickle the garden with the hoe. 

Then, envy often puts forth its ill-odored 
flower when the incapables look at us capables' 
garden. I have had such experiences repeatedly 
— and attribute them to the weakness of human 
nature. They are sign of its extreme frailty. 
I condone it but cannot approve it. For instance, 
after I had sweat and moiled and toiled many 
long, intellectual hours over a garden which 
produced less or more according to how much 
it yielded, an envious neighbor sent me this poem. 

It was the busy hour of four, 
When from a city hardware store, 
Emerged a gentleman who bore 

1 hoe, 

1 spade, 

1 wheelbarrow. 



THE FUN OF MAKING GARDEN 69 

From thence our hero promptly went 

Into a seed establishment. 

And for these things his money spent: 

1 peek of bulbs, 

1 job lot of shrubs, 

1 quart of assorted seeds. 

He has a garden under way. 
And if he's fairly lucky, say. 
He'll have, about the last of May, 

1 squash vine, 

1 egg plant, 

1 radish. 

— {Washington Herald,) 

The poem is not inserted here as a vegetable 
to be cultivated but as a weed to be rooted up. 
I now proceed to uproot it. This poem (so called) 
was sent me by the wife of my preacher. I read 
it with mingled anger and pity. I then 'phoned 
the minister who was married to this woman 
and told him that from that moment on, he 
might know that I had ceased to be a contributing 
member of his church. This, of course, interested 
the minister; and he asked me what he had done 
to result in such financial loss to him. I replied 
in a sturdy tone, at the end of the 'phone, that 
it was not a "he" which had hurt my feelings, 
but a "she." He regretted exceedingly that 
such an occurrence had cut off my weekly stipend 
from his embarrassed financial exchequer. What 
"she" could have invaded the sacred privacy of 
my feelings, he inquired, and I replied in a sten- 
torian voice that his "she" had done this thing. 



70 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

He was abashed. I did not wonder that he 
should be. I meant he should be. I had, so to 
speak, thrown a bombshell into his camp. He 
needed money. What preacher was there ever 
anywhere who did not.f^ He, in a quavering 
voice, quavering with intense emotion, said, 
'*Can I see you about this matter before it goes 
further.?" 

"No," I shouted, "it has already gone further." 
This caused him to scratch his head. He lin- 
gered at the 'phone. I cried, "Ring off!" but he 
implored, "Ring not off; give me a moment to 
think." I said, "You cannot do that in a moment. 
It takes you a long time to think. Ring off." 
Then I read him the poem and stated in icy tones 
that I could be oblivious in a measure to all 
save the last stanza or verse, I cared not which 
he called it, but those audacious words, "1 
radish." I could not excuse that sentiment. It 
was unpardonable; would he hang up the re- 
ceiver.'^ Our relations which had always been so 
pleasant and on which I doted were now nori 
est. I used that word as a settler. He took it 
so. And kept on talking. Now, this same 
minister by some means not known to me had 
acquired an apple orchard. He grew apples on 
his bushes he said. He asked if apples would 
in any measure medicine my lacerated feelings.'* 
I repHed that I could not reply. Not knowing, 
I could not say. He spoke feelingly to the effect 
that he would try. That, of course, was not my 



THE FUN OF MAKING GARDEN 71 

matter; and so I hung up the receiver. He has 
brought many apples since. My feehngs have 
been helped some. They may be healed in time; 
but it takes a good deal to make a true gardener 
get over a slur on his profession. 1 radish, for- 
sooth! But we good men must expect tribula- 
tions in this garden of a world. All Apples help 
some. 

Vhat to do with the weeds has been asked. 
I cannot attempt to answer all frivolous objec- 
tions offered to this Adamic trade we boast of, 
but a word at intervals may be helpful. Weeds 
may be burned or thrown over the fence or left 
growing. The last method is the most immethod- 
ical and unindustrious but scarcely the most 
helpful to the garden. You sweat less by weed- 
ing the garden by absent treatment but the 
vegetables vegetate less. All depends on your 
attitude toward the vegetables. To burn the 
weeds reduces them to an ideal state of incin- 
eration and has a tendency to stifle their taking 
root again that same season. Throwing them 
over the fence stimulates the scattering of the 
seed in your neighbor's garden and has, of course, 
an altruistic effect in a measure. Your neighbor, 
if he does not get mad and remark, has had a 
needed lesson in self-restraint. But it often 
happens that your neighbor does not have him- 
self under proper control. If he has not, the 
beneficent effect of throwing weeds over the 
fence is somewhat limited. One must judge for 



72 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

himself. I do. Independency of spirit should 
grow in every garden, whether the garden stuflP 
grows or not. 

Now if a chicken — note I return to the chicken, 
but that is because he returns to the garden and 
has to be dealt with. He is a difficulty; and 
difficulties must be faced by the brave. Now, 
if you hoed up a chicken, he is a weed and can 
be thrown over the fence. But it has been shown 
that that is not conducive to neighborliness. 
Hence let us give over thought of that method 
of dealing with this chicken weed. The next 
plan is to burn him, which I interpret as frying 
him. It prevents cold storage. Depend upon 
it, that this method frankly and steadily pur- 
sued will change your neighbor's chickens from 
a gardening impediment into a facilitation of 
the gardening process. 

Thus will the hoeing up of the chickens become 
a spring picnic of hoeing. 

You have to pursue this chicken weed. It is 
like running down a tumble weed, which is pos- 
itively exhilarating. Neighbors may think you 
are running a race, whereas you are humbly 
hoeing a chicken down or up, I know not which 
adverb to use. Both will do. Agility is educated 
in hoeing up chickens, which comes from no 
other weed. Now, this weed once down or up, 
the burning, otherwise frying, begins. I think 
that the best way yet discovered to deal with 
this particular weed. It ends the weed and does 



THE FUN OF MAKING GARDEN 73 

so with real pleasure. These methods undoubtedly 
rid the neighborhood of pin feathers and broilers 
but the neighbors must look to that. We garden. 
They run a hen roost; but our Christian duty 
is to look after our craft, and if in the sturdy 
industry of hoeing the garden and freeing it of 
weeds, one can incidentally have spring chickens 
on which to break one's fast, so much the better. 
In a word, nothing discourages a true gardener. 
He turns impediments into accelerations and 
incentives. Gardening must be encouraged. 

It is a prime blunder in gardening to think 
the business of gardening and the gardener is 
to raise vegetables. What a dull utilitarian a 
gardener would be who would so diagnose the 
gardener's task. Nay, verily. The main business 
to be accomplished in gardening is to make the 
effort. It is not a gardener's business to produce 
vegetables. It is his business to go through 
those motions which wisely directed do some- 
times ultimate in vegetables. That places gar- 
dening among the fine arts as also in the heroic 
occupations, such as discovery and hunting lions. 
There is the uncertainty in lion hunting as to 
whether you will consume the lion or the lion 
will consume you. This adds to the interest 
both of the lion and the man. Nothing is settled 
in this world prior to the event. There is a 
dash of wild courage, therefore, a rush of per- 
turbations, a swing of wild enthusiasm when a 
man strikes hoe into the ground for the making 



74 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

of a garden. How his toils will eventuate, whether 
in an onion or a disappointment, he knows not. 
He will know more when he is older. Let him 
hector the ground. Let him pound the clod. 
Let him lean over till his back aches and a lin- 
iment is in requisition. Let him listen to his 
wife as she leans menacingly from the window 
and advises him to plant radish seeds if he aspires 
to grow radishes. Let him hear the maid insist 
that he plant the onion sets bottoms down be- 
cause if he does not they will not come up. Let 
him hear with nonchalance the jeers of his neigh- 
bors as they go by, or what is worse, refuse to 
go by but stand and volunteer advice. Let the 
gardener do these things and he has done all 
that Providence really requires in his showing 
himself a man and a gardener and a correct 
descendant of Adam, the father of all who handle 
the hoe, as Jubal was the father of all such as 
blow on the horn (their own horn). O, to be a 
gardener and to plant things, and be serene 
whether they come up or not! May the race 
of such increase. 

The Truant Citizen 

Oh, I don't want to plow, 

An' I never want to hoe; 
Ruther be off yonder 

Where the honeysuckles grow, 
Wadin' in the daisies 

Whiter than the snow, 
All in a bright spring mornin*. 



THE FUN OF MAKING GARDEN 75 

Oh, I don't want to sow 

An' I never want to reap; 
Ruther be off yonder 

In the valleys green an' deep; 
Wind that waves the blossoms 

Singin' me to sleep, 
All in a bright spring morn in'. 

Never made fer toilin' — 

Only made to be 
Yonder where the river 

Is say in' things to me; 
Where the lily's tilted over 

By the gold weight of the bee. 
All in a bright spring mornin'. 

— Atlanta Constitution. 



XI 



THE MEADOW LARKS SINGING AND 
SILENT 

THINGS are always happening. Nothing is 
at standstill where God is. I am sitting 
beside a noble river. When coming to this 
particular city I always secure rooms at a cer- 
tain hotel for no reason save that it overlooks 
one of the rivers set apart in my book of days 
as of singular wonder. It is the roadway through 
which three great lakes are adventuring toward 
the ocean. A thousand miles away and more 
the sea awaits the coming of these waters; and 
the waters will not wait. They are ever at 
journey. Tireless under the noon or night, 
bridged by ice or spanned by the vast arch of 
blue which God hath set as a bow of promise, 
never disappearing nor waiting for the tragedy 
of stormy cloud, onward the river walks like an 
army bound for the front. Only silent, silent, 
silent — and sublime. 

This morning the river has on it flotillas of 
ice. The winter is losing grip. The ice floe is 
hungry for the sea, and because the archipelagoes 
are on the river's breast the motion of the stream 
is strangely and strongly apparent. No stand- 

76 



THE MEADOW LARKS 77 

still, no retardation, no ebb; only onward, seri- 
ously, serenely onward with a resolution which 
nothing can invade. This stately river's onward 
pictures without obscurity the no standstill in 
the world of God. Calm is a myth while we 
pitch our tents on a sphere which speeds along 
a roadway we dimly trace at the pace of a mil- 
lion miles the day and past. We are at journey. 
We are in haste. The whole wide, wise world 
refuses slumber. No opiate can put nature to 
sleep for long nor some of nature asleep for a 
minute. Somewhere the bird ever waketh and 
the sea is forever at chmb of shore or resolution 
for the windy deep. 

So, on one day in my home at the south porch 
of this land of ours, the sky was deep abundant 
blue. The sunshine was at flush of triumph. 
The world was wizarded over by the sunlight. 
And can anyone evade the fresh miracle of sun- 
light.'^ Can a soul fall so dead asleep as not to 
answer to the outrush of the light where in trans- 
parent skies and near the south the sunshine 
has its way and even midwinter if the sun can 
break through the sullenness of cloud, the sun- 
shine warms the heart and the window, blithe 
as the backtalk of the birds .^^ 

In this Oklahoma weather, if the sun has 
his chance, we who love the lure of the sun- 
light and court freckles can have a springtime 
holiday. 

And this day was wild with light. The sun 



78 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

seemed come to stay. He asserted his suprem- 
acy as an inference and never as an argument. 
The sun will not argue. You can never catch 
the sun in open lying any more than you could 
Jack Falstaff. The sun does things which de- 
ceive even the elect in matters of weather, and 
then when he backs down and disappears from 
his own dooryard and you would accuse him of 
playing with the truth, then you discover the 
sun had made no promises: we had inferred. 
But this day the inference was triumphant. 
The meadow larks and I knew a thing. And the 
meadow larks said what they knew. An empty 
block is just across the street from the house 
built for us, and there are apple trees, not a 
few upon it, and here, for what reasons I cannot 
name unless these wise birds know how full of 
love-wonder an apple tree at bloom always is, 
they cluster and clamor in their sweet staccato 
and more than any single place hereabouts the 
larks go skylarking. And to-day they are drunk 
with song. Their lyrics tumble over each other 
like hoydens. They scarcely intermit a moment. 
They must sing, and they do without a hesitant 
mood. I have learned to distrust my own 
sagacity; it has so often failed me. I know when 
not to affect wisdom. But I confess to finding 
it next door to the impossible to discount the 
knowledge of the birds. They are so sure them- 
selves. They never have a tentative note in 
their voice. They are categorical. They are 



THE MEADOW LARKS 79 

possessors of the "Yea, verily," and when they 
bewilder the sunlight with their happy laughter 
and make you think that in them sunlight is 
come to song or in meadow larks songs are come 
to sunshine, who could be sophist and remain 
dubitant? 

Spring has come to stay. We shall be visited 
by no more wild and winter weather. Hail to 
the gentle spring! 

The next morning I awake and the wild wind 
has awakened before me. The curtain is lifted 
in a jiffy. The whirl of a snow storm fills the 
sky. I cannot see across the block adjacent. 
The meadow with the orchard where yesterday 
the larks were rioting with song is this day 
rioted over with a stormy wind. The lustihood 
of the storm is contagious. I feel the fury in 
my blood. Where is spring? How many aeons 
ago did it vanish.? Will it ever come again.? 
Winter has come with jubilance to stay. No 
meadow lark sings to-day. No meadow lark is 
anywhere in sight. They are ashamed of their 
prognostications, maybe. Where are they, any- 
how.? But 'tis bootless to inquire. It is like 
asking where is Dr. Cook. Silence is the only 
answer. How the wind and the snow boil! The 
world is storm swept. This is no half-hearted, 
palsied effort of decrepit winter to let on he is 
in his frosty prime. All the day that storm raged 
with uninterrupted fury. Fury was the word. 
No other would name the day. Spirals of snow 



80 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

ran far up into the clouds and looked like in- 
verted water spouts grown frosty. There was 
snow on the ground in plenty, but the mark of 
the day was that the brawling wind coveted the 
snow for the angry sky and would not let the 
ground retain the snow fall but would scoop it 
up and fling it in vast and windy handfuls back 
into the sky spaces whence it came. It made 
a man proud who loves the wind to see the 
unchallenged supremacy the gale had. What a 
high day it was for such as love the rampant 
fury of the unleashed winds. But where are 
the larks.^ They know. I do not. To-morrow 
likely enough they will be as cocksure as they 
were yesterday. 

Birds have no shame about lying. They are 
so busy singing. Are singers mendacious.^ What 
heresy is this to raise so unmusical a question! 
But the meadow larks will not apologize nor 
will they explain. I am confident of that. I 
know them. Their truthfulness is in a back- 
slidden state. How the storm masters us all! 
The cars run by fits. The starts are there too; 
but the fits are the main matter of observation. 
Spring has gone oflF on a swift and compulsory 
journey. And we are not ill content. Winter 
is good. Let it stay a spell. Its anger is not 
obnoxious but palatable. The rage of the day- 
long, from dawn to dark, the skeins of snow, 
the blinding drift, the stagger of strong men 
before the wind, the drench of the whole firma- 



THE MEADOW LARKS 81 

ment with the hurricane of snows, spirals of 
aspiration climbing the heavens as to defeat old 
gravitation, who could be unresponsive to such 
demonstrations, much less angry with them! 

Yesterday was springtime, sweet of breath 
and full of song; to-day is winter — trumpet- 
voiced and far from calm. And both are days 
of God and he is on them both and in them 
both. 

And for them both I give Him thanks from a 
full heart. 



XII 



UNDER THE TENT OF THE WILD CRAB 
BLOSSOMING 

BETWEEN trains, a long, indolent, delicious 
June daylight. Think on that, you who 
love life and the bobolink's song. So hav- 
ing stowed my grips at the station, I hied me away. 
But as for that, when do I not hie me unto the 
fields if a thousandth part of a chance offer? 
My hieing apparatus is good and in perpetual 
repair. We shall not be staying in this out-of- 
doors world always, and we must sprawl down 
on the bank of its streams and drink the running 
water the most we may. To-morrow we may 
not be here, and the Master of it all may ask 
us for a report on the journey we have taken 
and we shall not wish to be abashed and silent. 
So till dusk darkens into darkness and the widest- 
awake bird is fast asleep on its sleepy bough, 
I shall be free. Nobody knows I am here and 
nobody cares. And it is winsome June a-calling 
and it is I a-coming to the call. 

"Give me health and a day and I will make 
the pomp of emperors ridiculous," said our 
transcendental friend Emerson; and he is right 
sometimes. He is right this time if he meant 
this June day; for I have health (and I give 

82 



THE WILD CRAB BLOSSOMING 83 

God thanks therefor) and this day, so now must 
I proceed to make the pomp of emperors ridic- 
ulous. If Emerson could, why not I? I too 
have transcendental moments — times when I 
walk the sky like the winged things. 

So I forage. That is the preamble of a day 
in the sunlight and shade. Hunger and good 
time are not true friends. A day of wonder, 
to have its way with you, must be let alone. 
The gnawings of hunger, or even the solicita- 
tions of hunger, are not helpers. They distract 
the mind. They detract from the wonder over- 
arching all. I can read "The Ode to Immor- 
tality" better when I am unhungry. Hunger 
attracts attention to itself. So, not as hailing 
from Sybaris, do I, one of God's common people, 
go foraging ere I go Juning up and down the 
world. I am a simple son of the soil and the 
sun and know that a bit of bacon cooked at the 
end of a stick over a sweetly smelling fire of 
last year's leaves and many a year's branches 
will help the sky and the wind and the swaying 
shadows to have their say with the bacon-ee. 
In eating "under the greenwood tree" (as says 
Shakespeare), and "far from the madding crowd" 
(as says Gray in the "Elegy"), I shall not be 
pampering the flesh but liberating the spirit. 
I shall be drying the gadfly's wings, so to say, 
so that he may make rainbows above some 
drowsy brook. 



84 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

The foraging is accomplished. Lest the irre- 
ligious misapprehend (as the manner of the 
wicked is) and suppose that foraging means pur- 
loining, I will proclaim that such edibles as are 
foraged for by me are paid for in good cash. 
Honesty is the right policy when a body goes 
forth to emperor it over a day because the con- 
science must be in the sunlight lest the eyes see 
no vistas and the ears hear no song. 

So, away, away, blithe heart. The day is 
thine! Enjoy this day. Carpe diem, though we 
shall not need Horace or the odors of his Alban 
farm to help us. The bobolink is here and puts 
Horace to discomfit and silence. 

For on this day I first heard the bobolink. 
This may seem untraveled; but is not truth often 
untraveled.? Yet even so it was. My rearing 
had been where no bobolink lifted his voice nor 
gave us the courtesy of his presence. And here 
on this June day in Wisconsin I was totally 
unaware the bobolink was within a sky's width 
when, on a sudden, I, wading across lots on a 
springy ground half prairie and half marsh, 
where the wild growth tangled and tossed, a 
flash of brown-white wings flashing in flight and 
dulcet song rich with June's wild staccato 
thrilled me — discovered me until I set down 
the things I had foraged and wandered about 
with the vagabond of June and challenged him 
for another flight and another tune. When he 
came to the humid grass as on broken wing, I 



THE WILD CRAB BLOSSOMING 85 

came on stirring up the ecstasy in the throat of 
this lyrist, half maudlin with his own melody. 
"O bobolink, bobolink-link-link-bobolink, spring 
and spring and spring, O bobolink, bobolink," 
quavered on in flight which was as drunken as 
his voice but drunk with the wild delight of 
June and life. The wind blew free. The sky 
arched blue and very far. The world, the whole 
world seemed built for this bird minstrel, this 
wandering poet of the sky. Bobolink, thou art 
this day's musician. It needs nor will receive 
any other. Thou art suflicient. 

And I discover the forage and set out again 
off again aimlessly. Blessed be the aimless ways 
when it is June. The going anywhere which 
leads to nowhere, or, what is more truthful, 
leads to everywhere. I had no direction. Can- 
not an emperor go where he will and as he 
will? I will follow or flee from the wind. I will 
meander with the stream or lie down beside it. I 
will putter along a prairie shining with flowers. 
I will run the bobolink down. I will sweat in 
the sun. I will saunter in the shadow. I will 
sprawl full length in the fragrant grass. I will 
follow the listless behests of my vagabond desire 
till the birds fall asleep to-night. If any, pass- 
ing by, ask, "Where are you going?'' the reply 
shall be "Somewhere," or else "Nowhere." Either 
will be truthful; neither will be so explicit as that 
he could run me down by my directions. Out 
with God somewhere— what a jocund destina- 



86 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

tion! And I wander on wherever my feet go. 
They lead; I follow. We must not ask directions 
when out on a trip with the winds and the bobo- 
link. I know that full well and ask no questions. 
Nay, where is good.'^ I like it all round here. 
If I fall into a stream, that is good; and if I 
loiter by one, that is good. All things are made 
to order. Nothing can come amiss on a day 
like this. No, directions and distances when you 
are out trysting with June would be worse than 
an infelicity. Where the instinct of my feet 
led, thither I went. But the instinct was witful. 

For I came in my journeys to a wild crab 
grove in radiant and amazing bloom. Nothing 
I ever saw of crab bloom was kinsman to this 
apocalypse. The wild crab at bloom I had 
known and loved since I was a college lad and 
fetched the perfumed branches to my bachelor 
room and had hung around them whensoever and 
wheresoever I could and had counted a few wild 
crab trees on my farm greater treasure than the 
crops which the farm was supposed to produce. 
I had climbed stake-and-rider fences and barbed- 
wire fences, and had run the gauntlet of angry 
dogs to get a whiff of wild crabs at bloom, so 
was I no tyro in crab blossoms. Wherever I had 
seen these pink, perfumed banners swaying in 
wind there had I gone "per aspera, nothing caring. 
But here was the valley of Avillion and all abloom 
with the wild crab. I had not known what 



THE WILD CRAB BLOSSOMING 87 

flower it was shed perfume in the valley of Avil- 
hon till now. We shall find out all we want to 
know in due time. In this silence of odor and 
color no wind blew loudly. Nay, no wind blew 
at all. A forest of crab trees is what I had come 
upon. I shouted (and am I not a Methodist 
and who should stay me?). Shouted, imperially 
as an emperor. I had health and a day and a 
forest of wild crab in flower. I could not see 
out, nor through, nor up. They are my zenith 
and horizon. No leaves are visible, but flowers, 
flowers, flowers, flowers. The wealth of that 
lovely blossoming I have never seen approx- 
imated. You could not see the branches on 
which the blossoms hung. You saw no trunk, 
no branch, only solely a tree of pink perfume. 
I sprawled under the scent and color. I lay 
flat on my back, put my hands, fingers inter- 
knit, beneath my head for a pillow and let the 
day go as it would. I furloughed the world. 
I prayed and sung my psalm. I sang no peni- 
tential psalm that day, but the songs of Asaph 
and threw "selahs" in like an applause. The 
sky was blue I doubted not. It had been when 
of late I wandered into that world where the sky 
was pink perfume from day dawn to dark and 
a body wanted nothing other. I found myself 
speaking to myself of "the late world," as if it 
were defunct. How far away it was! God is 
here, and his garments are perfumed and like 
the light. 



88 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

But the day waned; and I stepped not outside 
my tent. The world was not. The bobolink was 
silenced. Nothing sang or spake save the crab 
blossoms distilling their music and poetry — voices 
of silence. And ere I knew it the night was 
darkening down. Where has this day gone.'^ A 
few minutes ago I came here and now the dark 
dawneth. Is it so in Avillion.^^ 

Day is spent and I must go. Trains do not 
wait for preachers. The day in my calendar is 
marked "Under the tent of the wild crab 
blossoming." 

• • • 

Certain old illuminators, when they had reached 
the longed-for last page and word, wrote in 
reverent wise ''Lmis deo,'' I, in like manner, 
after a day of unspeakable delight under swaying 
branches of tourmaline pink doused with musk 
of the sky, write sedately in my heart, Laus deo. 



XIII 

WHERE MOUNTAIN AND PRAIRIE 
MEET 

ON giving the landscape temporary consid- 
eration we would incline to the opinion 
that if mountain and prairie were related 
at all, they were distant relatives. They dwell in 
places so far apart and in regions so remoto in 
purpose and in place as to be aliens onf' ^'.^ f},^ 
other. Yet here, as in many matter^ ^-v- :♦( hi 
error. These are near neighbors f:r : ' ; i ,. 

To-day I saw where they r^^' tod Il.<, holi- 
day. A patch of mountain : . >.f -» Wd -irded 
about with the wild profi ,,j r.f !<,^rj sun- 
flowers. I could have sui|f( r,|^ ijl. , l^.jy with 
the first nibble of the spring. Ikn- was the tryst 
of mountain and prairie. Sunflov.rr and poppy. 
The poppy had wandered down from the moun- 
tain passes and acclivities and the sunflower had 
climbed on with the vagrant mood' it wears in 
its yellow juices wldch course through its veins 
like ardent fires. The flower which far down 
on lower prairie levels stands tall as a man on 
horseback, here reaches barely to a grown man's 
knees, but the smile of thestmis there; and the 
eternal welcome of the prairies is there, and the 

89 



90 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

challenge of the morning is there, every yellow 
blossom standing tiptoe, waiting for the sunrise. 
The sunflower and the poppy, the prairie and the 
mountain, what resistless romancists these must 
ever be to such as have a dream-room in the 
soul. The prairie is the wide; and the mountain 
is the high; and when these two journey and 
look into each other's faces, I am one who would 
pilgrim far to see the meeting. The prairie is so 
wide and so fertile: the mountain is so high and 
so barren. I see his stately climbing now in 
serrate ranges which, "Like a old lions' whelk 
tooth," as Browning so jaggedly puts it, cuts the 
sky again and again, barren peaks snow-capped 
or so steep in some sides that no snow can cling 
to the swift acclivity, so all winter long and 
through, when the world is white as vair the 
black mountainside frowns on the plains below. 
Barren, blistered, treeless, grassless, uninhabited, 
save of the wild mountain sheep who covet 
scanty pastures, being God's born economists. 
The mountain builds no granary, seeing it would 
rot unprofited; for what boots a granary built 
if there be no corn? 

The barren mountain, but the fertile prairie! 
There the herds feed and lie down as of old 
amidst the green pastures. There the plow turns 
fertile glebe and harvests clap their ruddy hands 
and sing. The prairie is competent to feed the 
hunger of the world. And is the mountain surly 
and angry and set on making the race of men 



MOUNTAIN AND PRAIRIE MEET 91 

speedy mortalities? Nay, friend, the mountain 
is no ogre, but a man of high design. 

Mountain and prairie are friends. They work 
in wide companionship and homely comity. 
They are met at parley like old friends. The 
poppy and the sunflower are at converse. 

How white the poppy is and thorny! The 
desert mountain has gotten into the poppy's 
heart. It snarls and is ungracious to the touch, 
but is very fair to look upon. It has the white 
heart. Its blood is like liquid moonbeams and 
its face is like blooming starlight. It slumbers 
from sunset to sunrise and then like some fair 
maiden, arrayed in spotless white, walketh out 
at the daylight to greet its lord. I have seen 
mountain poppies as fast asleep, to all appear- 
ances, as a tired child and as altogether unwak- 
able, yet at the first kiss of the sun they would 
leap out into blooming like a resurrection. They 
too are children of the sun. They root them in 
the mountain loneliness and loveliness and wander 
out on the deserts below the mountain refuges; 
but they know their king. They are not children 
of the night, but children of the light and of 
the day. From sun's going to sun's coming, 
they are dim and remote from all the things 
that breathe and sing. They could hear no 
whippoorwill at song if one came and sang 
beneath their lattice. "My lady sleeps*' (in 
Poe's poem). But when the Lover comes and 
leans and kisses her pale lips, then does this 



92 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

sleeping beauty cry aloud and shine out in white 
apparelment which no desert or mountain dust 
can ever tarnish. "I am awaiting thee, my 
king." 

Withal how the starlight has whispered unbe- 
known into the veins of the poppy. So we have 
not thought on it, nor would account us wise 
who whispered it, but the starlight hath sung 
its melody into the poppy's heart so that the 
flower is garmented not by the sun but by the 
stars. The poppy is white as clad in woven 
starbeams. Night and the day are met when 
the glistering whiteness of the poppy opens at 
a whisper from the sun. 

The prairie is here. The sunflower hath 
climbed the hill. The desert hath not crowded 
this torch-bearer back. This royal flower is still 
elate. It slumbers not. There are no nights 
in the sunflower's calendar. This prairie blossom 
wanders through all the halls of night with face 
so full of sunlit cheer as that all the long avenues 
of dreams are full as of quiet laughter with the 
lit lamps which cannot snuff their splendor 
out. The prairie watches for the sun as the 
mountain summits sublime are wont to do. The 
sunflowers are the prairie's sentinels on whom 
command is laid. "Sleep not, but wake and 
watch the advent of my lord, the Xing." And 
when the sun cries out along a hundred leagues 
of grass the prairie's flower hath turned its 
hundred thousand faces to perceive his advent. 



MOUNTAIN AND PRAIRIE MEET 93 

The sunflowers stand all night, here, keeping 
wakeful guard above the slumbrous poppies, 
their lamps all trimmed and burning and oil in 
their lamps. Not one foolish virgin in all this 
incalculable multitude. All lamps lit, all lamp- 
bearers awake and laughing in utter content and 
joyousness, and all shining lamps of yellow flame 
across the faces of the sleeping poppies spent 
with fatigue and lost in dreams. And at noon, 
sunflower and poppy, prairie and mountain, awake 
and well content and swooning not although the 
desert heat at the mountain's base is torrid. 
When shall I forget these flowers of starlight 
and of sunlight swarming on the dreary plain? 
My prairie and my mountain, once again I 
greet you, and may I meet you and your sun 
and poppy flower where deserts swelter no more 
in fierce discontent, amidst the laughter of the 
running streams of heaven, meet you. 



XIV 

WHEN THE WORLD IS AN APPLE 
ORCHARD IN FULL BLOOM 

WHEN the farmer is a poet anything 
beautiful may happen and that with- 
out trouble. Landing at Fort Dodge, 
Iowa, to dedicate a noble church with a chime of 
bells of rare melody, set by a widowed heart in 
memory of her husband who had been a public man, 
whose voice had had an orchestral music in it and 
had spoken through years for all right things, mine 
adversary who met me at the station said, in 
a sly way, that if I could spare a few minutes, 
he would motor me to an apple orchard of one 
hundred eighty-six acres. My reply, in equal 
courtesy, was that though my time was of great 
value, I being a man of affairs, I thought I could 
take a very few minutes off to go to the orchard 
in bloom. These diplomatic preliminaries having 
gotten on satisfactorily to both participants 
therein, we took a rush for the orchard. He 
said it was in bloom. He told the truth. We 
rushed through the beautiful city: we spied the 
happy children with laps full, arms full, hearts 
full of wild flowers, fresh plucked from the dear 
woodland ways. We cruised along a stream, 

94 



APPLE O'RCHARD IN FULL BLOOM 95 

then crossed it: we bounded up the hill, and 
looked down on a pool of wild crabs, eagering 
to be at flower. The motor sniffed the apple 
breath and hurried up and we turned from the 
main road with a whir and went laughing up a 
lane amidst all sorts of kindly trees, promiscu- 
ously planted and jostling each other as if God 
had planted them; and apple trees crowd up 
close as if inquisitive to see the faces of these 
callers and the master of the motor, as he steered 
us lightly, to a query of mine, "Does this man 
know how beautiful this is?" rejoined, "He is 
something of a poet, in a way." Ah, yes, some- 
thing of a poet in a way, in God's way, I found 
him. 

His house was well back from the road. The 
road could not see his house nor could his house 
see the road. It was embowered in quiet and 
the hush of happy winds and bees drooning, 
and trees crowded together in a veritable city 
of music. We might have been in Edmund 
Spenser's Faerie Land where all things mystical 
and dreamful could happen effortlessly as a star- 
rise. We are intruders on a poet's premises. I 
watched to see him. Honestly, I am curious, 
though no woman am I, yet curiosity always 
seizes me when I am in a neighborhood of poetry. 
I want to guess the looks of poets and rectify 
my conclusions by facing the facts. We ran 
up a ravine intruded on by the inquisitive apple 
trees which came close to peer at us like kindly 



96 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

cattle in a pasture, and took by surprise a white 
cottage embowered in many trees of many species 
and then the road dropped into a half-ravine 
where a crystal spring lay unwrinkled beneath 
willows, common and laurel-leaved, and it dreamed 
back from its face willows and sky while a runnel 
which did not whisper slipped down to a stream 
hard by. On the banks our poet farmer had 
planted pine and many willows and a cut-leafed 
birch, beautiful enough to have adorned the 
woodlands of paradise. I was nosing around 
for the poet-farmer. 

His trees and vines had been disposed with 
much poet lore of place and variety on a bank 
which lifted its broadly rounded shoulder and 
looked over a generous expanse of river and 
bridge and highway and opposing acclivity and 
croft where distant vistas of apple trees shone 
like dashes of sea foam on ocean rocks. In my 
mind's eye I could see our farmer friend in quiet 
love of loveliness with spade in hand and little 
trees for the planting lying close at hand, and 
he planting and planting and digging and planting. 

Can there be greater fun or greater poetry 
than planting trees and having their to-morrows 
of bloom and fruit haunt you with their proph- 
ecy.? The thrust of the spade in the sod, the 
tossing out of the damp earth, with eternal 
harvest promise in its breath and its residuum 
of all earth's yesterdays and also the kindly 
promise of its many to-morrows, and then when 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL BLOOM 97 

the hole is deep enough and wide enough and 
the ground within mellow enough to put your 
hands in it and mix the soil (cool and sweet the 
soil is, and clings like a curl about the fingers), 
and then with ample gentleness to dispose the 
roots and rootlets of the tree-to-be but shrub 
that is, and sift earth about those thready roots 
and cover them up very gently, as you would 
a grave in which lay a dead robin redbreast; 
then when all the babying process is concluded 
to press the moist earth with your foot until 
you surmise the roots are bedded and feel at home, 
and so, rising, do the like with another tree. 
That's fun. Men want pay for doing it, but 
'tis infamous. They should pay for the priv- 
ilege of doing this poetical thing. An orchardist 
should not plant too many trees at once lest 
the labor tax the poetry in him and he do a 
lovely thing in an unlovely mood. I would 
plant a few at a time and vary the kind I planted 
— here a lilac, here a dogwood, here a wild crab, 
now a sycamore, now a hazelnut, now a white 
willow, here a Niobe willow, here a cottonwood, 
here a wild rose, now a Dorothy Perkins, then a 
bittersweet, now a red bud, now a fruit tree 
for fruit, now fruit trees by clumps for spring 
flowers and autumnal leaf-glory (say, a group of 
pear trees which when autumn burns is mem- 
orable and their watch fires have a strange glory 
on them), here a clump of cedars, here a stray 
pine, then a birch, and here sassafras for autumn 



98 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

splendor like summer in conflagration, here a 
wild rose, now an aster, here a trillium, now a 
rosa rugosa to give single rose blossom all the 
summer through. What a degradation not to 
know that all this is a liberal culture if done 
in the spirit of the Master of the Garden and the 
Wildwood. 

Would all the farmers were poets ! How goodly 
would their sweet vocations seem as well as how 
wholesome; and a refined ecstasy would run 
along their veins through all the months which 
constitute the year. Not to perceive the fun and 
poetry of farming is to rob the soul; and not 
to know the poetry of agriculture is a misdemeanor 
of unusual proportions. Woe is me if poetry slips 
from my vocabulary when I plant and sow and 
fain would reap. It is as delicious to see trees 
of your own hand-planting grow as to swim in 
a crystal stream under pine shadows. To work 
with a grim utility makes people old before their 
time; while to know each morning is a pageant 
and each night's arrival a beatitude, redeems 
labor from drudgery and turns farming into an 
aesthetic procedure like carving a Milo's Venus. 

Meantime I am in the apple orchard and 
digressing, though I make no apologies, seeing 
digressions are the worth-whiles on the Pipes of 
Pan. I am hunting for the poet who planted 
this orchard and these other unfruitful trees 
which bear the pleasant apples of far Hesperides, 
for though we eat not this fruit, we none the 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL BLOOM 99 

less know full well it is an edible to the soul. 
"Where is the poet-farmer?" inquire I of the 
questful mood. Whereupon the guide of the 
apple orchard in bloom bids me be patient and 
we shall find him somewhere in the happy miles 
of orchard. So on we move in quest of the poet 
who planted this farm to perfect flower and 
promissory fruit. We come on him at a turn 
in the road. 

He is ideal and satisfies my soul. He is un- 
shaven for a spell and his face is husky as no 
smooth-shaven face ever does look. We men 
look polite when smoothly shaven, but not 
neglectful enough to be part of the growing 
world. Closely trimmed lawns are neither rational 
nor aesthetic. They have lost spontaneity. They 
are only well-bred and conventional. Grass 
grown by those who know how will be let alone; 
so must trees and whiskers. And a man clean- 
shaven each morning and talcumed looks polite 
enough but lacks patent power and the inde- 
fatigably robust, nor could he be pictured as a 
cowboy on the run nor a victorious soldier on the 
battle front. Our friend was unkempt enough 
to be a part of nature where things get their 
way and caper a little rather than go by dancing 
master's rules. His hair and mustache were 
grizzled. This poet had been on this ground a 
good while, as testify the vines and shrubs and 
orchard he had planted and the snow flakes that 
refuse to melt from his pow and the lines that 



100 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

zigzagged like genial lightning along his looks. 
He was in his shirt sleeves. Of course! Coujd 
a man be a poet-farmer and go around in his 
coat all the while? Preposterous! Say that 
word again, and say it louder. Adam never 
wore a coat. He went around with his shirt 
sleeves rolled up every day of his redolent year, 
sown to musk odors and dew-drench of the 
night and dawn. You don't look like business 
with a trim coat on when you're going about 
poetastering in a paradise. You look like a 
clothing merchant, which won't do for an out- 
of-doors poet. Nay, verily. More nay verilies. 
To be sure, he wore no cuflFs. You can't cuff 
your way to the proprietorship of multimiles of 
odorous orchard blooms. 

His hands were naked and dirty with the 
dirt in which trees root — good clean, undirty dirt, 
loved by all flowers, trailing arbutus, fuchsias. May 
apples, Solomon's seals, prairie phlox, flowerless 
fronds of ferns, and wistful wild violets — that 
good dirt was on his hands; and his hands were 
brawny and masterful. When I shook hands 
with him I knew a man was owner of that right 
hand, hard at the palm, sinewy of fingers, dig- 
nified of labor, coworker with the ground and 
the sky, and the God of both to make the world 
beautiful in its season. It was a handsome 
hand, which if interpreted to mean "some hand," 
the exegesis would be legitimate. It would be 
ridiculous even to think of that brawny, business 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL BLOOM 101 

hand wearing white kid gloves. Honestly, that 
would make a mummy laugh. White kid gloves 
on these hands! Positively, that is past jest; 
that is insult. This man in evening clothes? 
Cease such suggestions, lest the poet-farmer and 
I both grow angry and throw you from these 
premises, landing you where you belong in the 
rubbish heap for the spring freshets to wash away. 
We are shaking hands, the poet-farmer and I. 
And his hat is a work of art. It is a high art, 
seeing it is at the top of this man. There is where 
a hat should stay. It was a derby which was 
a psychological blunder as well as a caput-al- 
mistake, but I think it had been bought by his 
wife or hired man at a bargain sale; for I would 
exonerate him from having chosen it. This 
should have been a soft hat. That settles on 
your head and to it like suds about your hands 
at the washing. You can sit on it and not in- 
dent it. You can wad it up and throw it at a 
mule and not disfigure the mule much nor your 
hat any. This hat was, so to say, homogeneous, if 
at times a little incoherent, incoherency caught, 
I think, from the brain of the wearer. This 
orchard hat was a derby, but an old one. Thank 
goodness! Age will dignify even a derby hat, on 
which I remark that after that, no wonderwork 
may be thought impossible to age. There was 
an indentation on one side thereof as if an apple 
tree in a storm had blown against it. The hat 
had an inebriated look as if the smell of the 



102 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

apple-bloom breath had made it tipsy. It sat 
akimbo on the poet's head, as if born out under 
the trees, in a wind-blown fashion like a wind- 
turned leaf. The hat had a weather-beaten, sun- 
burnt look as if it could have voted and sat like 
a small boy on a gate post when a circus invades 
the town. 

The orchardist wore shoes. That was a tribute 
to civilization. He should have worn sandals 
or, which was better, should have gone bare- 
foot. Unquestionably, barefootedness is the right 
footgear for a farmer; and besides, it minds us 
of how among Maeterlinck's happinesses in "The 
Blue-Bird" there troops "the happiness of going 
barefoot in the dew." I feel the grass tickling 
my legs right now! So, I met the master of 
these florescent revels, this farmer-Prospero who 
has covered up all this orchard and runnel bank 
and comb and long reach with a white foam of 
an ocean far-spreading to the sky, an ocean of 
precious apple-bloom. Howbeit, not as at the 
wave of good man Shakespeare's bearded Pros- 
per©, but at the dig of this Prospero's spade and 
hoe has this ocean been turned into a turbulence 
of storm so that the green waves are all one wild 
wallow of foam, white to the eyes as sea gull's 
wings. The old Greeks yclept the poet "Poietes," 
a maker. Wherefore by my halidome (from 
Captain Dalgetty and others whose names slip 
me now) and in good sooth, this friend of my 
recent making is squarely and irrefutably a poet, 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL BLOOM 103 

for has he not made this orchard? Incidentally, 
God helped him, though of what other poet is 
that not true? Poets make not themselves, else 
all professors of literature would be poets, whereas 
none of them are. They pull poetry to pieces 
and tell how had they written it, it would have 
been written, but forget to remark that in such 
case people had not read it. I read how many 
changes should have been made in Milton's 
unapproachable music of "Paradise Lost," and 
then regard gleefully the consideration that as 
Milton made the poem, so it stands. The crit- 
ical mutterings do not disturb the everlasting 
calm of that illustrious poem. 

Yes, this orchard-maker is poet when we allow 
the old Greek notion concerning poetry. I found 
the orchardist genial. He would go with us 
through his land of wonder, though we forbade 
him in the name of the value of his time. He 
felt conditioned to do as he pleased on his own 
premises and heeded not our prattlings, but went 
with us. It was like walking with Alfred 
Tennyson or him of the "Marshes of Glynn." 
How he loved it all! To hear him talk of the 
growing of the orchard was like hearing 
Tennyson's ocean voice read "Ulysses." At 
least so I think. He knew the birthdays of the 
willows at the stream-head and of the pine trees 
on the shoulder of the hill that looked down 
on the winding river and the birthday of the 
vines which tangled over the hackberry trees. 



104 WITH EAI^TH AND SKY 

wild vagrants of the sky, and the birthday of 
the apple trees which marshaled the landscape 
we behold like white clouds billowing. He had 
rocked every cradle of every tree in this wide 
wandering land of foamy loveliness. I could 
all but hear the lullabies he sang them with his 
man's sturdy voice hushed till it crooned like an 
autumn wind. 

The orchard was now untouched of the plow, 
paved with bluegrass. Not a weed intruded on 
the scene, only flashing green of grass, than which 
the high God has made no growing thing more 
witchery-crowded. To walk on floor of green 
with amethyst skies sweet above, Heigh O the 
wind and the rain! Along the green paths of 
apple bloom, as if they had fallen from the wet 
hand of a rainy wind, lay apple branches dead, 
and wistful to be given one last laughter of an 
apple tree fire. My fingers itched to gather 
the dead scattered branches, for whether it be 
sea-soaked driftwood of ships of yesterday or 
hickory wood or pine knots and branches high 
up in the mountains, I am of the mood to believe 
that none of them surpass apple trees for poetry 
of flame. Hickory sparkles swim up the sky 
with crackling fairy salutations as fired from 
some fairy headland, minute yet delicious salvos 
of a fleet sailing out not to return, whereas apple 
trunks and boughs emit their sparkles without 
a syllable of voice, just aerial flamboyancy, the 
beading of apple blooming and apple juice with 



APPLE ORCHARD LN f iJLL BLOOM 105 

its hint of mild inebriation wiiich ends in poetical 
hilarity which makes for the laughter of the 
angels. 

I wanted to stay in those miles of apple blooms 
till the sun had set and the stars had risen and 
the moon had filled the sky with its wonder- 
light for which there are no words. And to have 
lit an apple-tree fire and to have sat beside it 
would have been to set a linnet's song to a lark's 
music. With the smoke and the efflorescent 
sparkles and the lovely and the exalted night 
and the apple-bloom breath, there would have 
been a joy like being sung to by angels. 

And this one hundred eighty-six acres of apple 
trees in bloom must be experienced to be appre- 
hended. I do not say comprehended, for that is 
a witless word in such a scene. Throughout its 
length and breadth and height (for this orchard 
of bloom was cubic measure and so no super- 
ficial area could compass the phrasing of it) 
was perfect peace of a perfect day. Perfect 
peace! Height was its most splendid dimension. 
The height led up to God. 

This was no hemisphere we dwelt in, but a 
whole sphere. We could not see out. It was a 
world far-going, glad-going, so white the petals 
were, scarce touched by any pink at all. That 
was a peculiarity of the apple blossoms we beheld 
in this orchard to-day. 'Twas a white wonder- 
land. It was starlight rather than dawnlight. 
We were shut in by apple bloom. If this apple- 



106 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

blossom world ended, we could only surmise it. 
The vistas of green paths between rows of redolent 
flowers ended by being swallowed up by the 
bloom. No green road traveled through this 
illimitable world. End was there none to the 
apple blossoms. The only way out of the foam 
of flower was to transcend the world and take 
passage into the blue of the overhead. 

On we went loiteringly, always loiteringly, 
truly. Could a body be so unmannerly as to 
ha^te in such a house of praise as this.'^ The 
gladness seems like great laughter. Each tree 
was preempted by flowers as the magnolia whose 
flowers come and cover the tree completely or 
ever there is a dream of leaf. And every tree 
was like a nosegay held out in the hand of God 
to be worn at an angel's heart. 

An auto load of women came into this sanctuary 
of perfumed beauty. Where is it where beauty 
is present that lovely women do not come seeing 
God has made them such lovers of beauty in 
everything except husbands? They seem color- 
blind in men. Goody! But here they were, 
these women younger or older according to their 
age (I think that is admirably put and com- 
promises neither the women nor me), all aglow 
with the wonder of the glory of the apple orchard 
in full flower. And they wanted to cut apple 
branches! I think they would have done it 
without permission. Women have an anarchistic 
strain in their blood though they look so docile. 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL BLOOM 107 

But the master of the revels was here and gave 
them leave. They used it. It was funny to see 
them saw the branches with a jack-knife. But 
for pohteness, I should have smiled. It is a 
grim thing to be poHte. But they broke and 
sawed and laughed out loud in chorus and the 
poet orchard-master bade them be generous in 
their taking, and some such words to us men, 
and when we were too polite to mutilate his 
majestical bouquets of a whole tree at unanimous 
flower, he took his huge pruning knife and cut 
off young trees blossom-laden and made us bear 
them as his contribution to the dedicatory service 
of the church on the morrow. 

And so thither the flowers came on that good 
to-morrow when the chimes rained out holy hymns, 
and the people sang out like the voice of many 
waters and I, poor slipshod that I was, in that 
high function, tried to preach. But the apple 
blossoms outpreached, outsang, outchimed us all. 

When God's flowers turn minister then truly 
is there a saintly sermon. "Bloom ye," said the 
Sunday apple blossoms. "Bloom ye, ye folk of 
God, even as bloom we, God's apple orchard. 
As we, so ye, yield bloom and fruit to the glory 
of God the Father, and the Son, and the Holy 
Ghost. Amen." 



XV 

WHEN THE WORLD IS AN APPLE 
ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 

THERE are things too sweet to tell about. 
This apple orchard in full fruit is one of 
them. The plague of lovely things is that 
while the observer of them is well aware he cannot 
tell the loveliness he sees, this very incapacity digs 
rowels in his side to drive him on to attempt 
what himself in conscience knows through all 
his fineness and deepness he cannot do. If I 
here bestir me to attempt what I should not 
attempt but shall attempt and know my inability 
to achieve, the fault is not mine: it is the fault 
of the apple orchard in full fruit. 

Another where have I dipped my pen in apple- 
blossom perfume to inscribe a prose lyric to an 
apple orchard in full bloom. With whatever of 
insagacity and incapacity I performed that feat, 
I did it with a sky- wide and sky-high sincerity. 
I wanted to catch the perfume of that paradise 
and swing it in an earthen censer till thousands 
of hearts should have wafted across their winter 
world with the blowing trumpets of winter winds 
apple fragrance to inundate their hearts with 
springtime. 

108 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 109 

If, now, stung by the splendor of this 
autumnal glow and the riot of the hills and this 
apple orchard in bewilderment of fruit not passed 
into dull prosaieality by the act of fruitage but 
redolent with poetry of the spring wonder of 
spring blossom, I essay this other landscape and 
fruited loveliness, I shall exonerate myself as 
being incompetent to keep silence in the presence 
of summer which luxuriated in growth and panted 
toward this plenty which covered the valleys 
and overran the hills. 

I ran across this particular apple orchard after 
a goodly manner. A gracious woman dared me, 
and who was I, possessed as I am of a stock of 
man -bravery, to let a woman's dare go unaccepted .^^ 
The day of the challenge was serious with Indian 
summer haze and far-off mist which portended 
no rain. It simply said in entrancing words that 
Indian summer was come to pitch her tent a 
few days amongst us. I was preaching-bound. 
What so becomes any regalest day of a man's 
life as lifting his voice about the good God who, 
loving the race of man with a love that baffles 
human understanding, thought it no trouble to 
die for men, when the preacher himself is one 
of those died for.^ I will preach on every great 
day of the soul, for in so doing I attempt my 
wildest attempt to strike wings with the winged 
blood-washed immortals who have a residence in 
heaven. So, amidst tumult of autumnal splendor 
among Pennsylvania mountains, I was en route 



110 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

to lift my voice for the Builder of the mountains 
and the great Great Forester who planted the 
trees and gave them this everlasting poetry. 
We were driving away from a new moon with 
its silver sickle whetted for harvest on the hills, 
the harvest of glorious foliage and falling leaves, 
and the misty mountains smoked across by the 
Indian summer smoke as if all the wigwams 
that ever kindled a wood fire had puffed their 
blue smoke into this October sky. I was to stay 
the night where I was to preach and — intrudes 
the gracious woman who with her gracious 
husband for Jehu drove to this tryst with God. 
"If you will go back with us," said the enchant- 
ress, "we will take you to mountaintop where 
you shall see such an apple orchard as your eyes 
have never rested on." And the husband's voice 
swung in with its musical echo of assent and 
urgency. Now, I being an extemporaneous 
speaker, was not caught napping for a reply. 
My voice with the velocity of a flock of quails 
when they first take to wing answered "I will." 
It sounded swift and eager like a bridegroom's 
response at the marriage altar. The night was 
hurrying into gloaming and I cannot be sure 
in that semiobscurity whether my swift acceptance 
took the proponents thereof by surprise, but 
they answered to it with a laughter which seemed 
like the bells of hospitality all ringing at once. 
So the die was cast {alea jacta est, quoth Mr. 
Csesar — Julius, to be exact). I had crossed no 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 111 

Rubicon but had stepped into the brook of a 
setting day to cross to a day all wonder and wist- 
fulness and invitation to my soul. So the evening 
preachment ended and the Christian good-bys 
said, we betook us to the journey to the apple 
orchard in full fruit, hurrying through the starry 
dark whence the moon had vanished and where 
perfume of fallen leaves nigh made the spirit 
swoon as under the song of the nightingale. 

I am confirmed in the belief that the gadfly 
which stung lo was the gadfly of beauty which 
must be told. Capable or incapable no matter, 
beauty w^hispers in insistent whispers "Attempt." 
However humble the perceiver of the beautiful, 
the peremptory voice prompts: "Say it. Tell the 
scene. Make no delay." 

"Grandly begin; though thou have time 
But for one line, be that sublime,'* 

said Poet Lowell while the summons of the sun- 
rise and the stars and great deeds marching 
with running march to death crushed about his 
soul like reverberating thunderbolts. With us 
lesser men and women the summons is the same. 
We seem not to have a choice. It must be told. 
There are not enough to tell this tale, wherefore 
all poets rise to the voice and write. It will be 
perfectly clear that this writer is well aware 
how inapposite his attempted endeavor and 
wishes to bow himself from the stage before the 
hissing at his hardihood accelerates his departure. 



112 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

No matter. He knows what he cannot do, and 
none the less he will push blithely on and attempt. 
Under the cool night with stars at Indian 
summer dimness we rode. A sweet wind lan- 
guished along the way. The night was voiceless 
save for the song of the high-powered car in which 
we sped, singing that song of happy toil which 
is one of the daily and nightly miracles of toiling 
hearts and toiling hands. When the birds build 
their nests and feed their broods and the nestlings 
are very hungry, then is when the wild birds 
sing their wildest songs. When they do but feed 
themselves they are silent. Singing befits labor 
as wings befit birds. So on we fared like night 
boats upon a kindly sea tossing up and down 
on the waves of the hills instead of waves of the 
water. Our course lay down hill toward a river. 
Our career was undulant, to be sure, as fits all 
mountains, but still downward bound. The Jehu 
voice said "Now, up mountain to the apple 
orchard." I had been well enough content in 
all reason feeling the dewy night and exchanging 
kisses with remote stars and having goodly 
fellowship with Christian friends with whom I 
am to fellowship in the eternal heavens. Yet at 
that prompt summons we headed off the road 
of our night ride and began to make visible 
ascent by detour truly, as the mountain forbade 
a sixty -horse-power car going straight up. The 
high shoulders of a mountain are on one side 
and pressing close to brush my cheek as I leaned 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 113 

from the car to catch every night breath the 
boughs ran past me with caress for my face; 
and star-revealed, a bit of dark on the other 
side where another mountain across a dark 
ravine gloomed in reticent state with stars glit- 
tering on its forehead, and on we passed and 
climbed our winding ways when the drip of 
water from a wayside spring made a body thirsty 
even in the damp dark, and I wanted to stop; 
but it was past midnight and our lady must 
in sooth have her beauty sleep, not as needing 
it but as insisting on it, and our Bucephalus 
climbed on nothing lingering, toward the apple 
orchard which every moment became more 
tangible ecstasy although an invisible ecstasy, 
then a last sprint and a glimpse of green visible 
under the trifling candles of the stars, the vivid 
green of fall wheat rejoicing in its first meeting 
of the light, then a turn and a spurt of laughter 
and the apple-breath saluted us and we came to 
a laughing standstill in the heart of the apple 
orchard. 

There I slept the little remainder of the night 
with heart all eager for the dawn and the sunup 
and the promise of the apple trees. You, reader, 
if so be you have never slept in an apple orchard 
guest-room with stars for candles and sky for 
roof, and the night wandering wind for min- 
strelsy, and apple orchard smells to sift through 
your slumbers, then, know this that God has in 
store for you some belated poetry. 



114 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

The morning came. A mid Indian summer 
morning. I need say no further word for such 
as love the Indian summer, as all poets do, and 
lesser poets like poetasters. We were on the 
summit of one mountain but not on the moun- 
tain summit. I like that distinction, for it is no 
hair-splitting. It is sonorous music. To crest 
a mountain has its overpowering revelation, but 
to top one mountain and have another mountain 
climbing on and up with lesser mountains and 
woodlands and valley-ghmpses open before your 
eyes and climbing on to other scenes, "T'other 
mountain," aye, heart, that is quintessential glad- 
ness. We see, but not all. There be other moun- 
tain heights still climbing and invitational and 
revelational. "You are come," the other climb- 
ing mountain beckons, "not to the summit but 
to the summons. Come hither. I wait for ye. 
Haste not but come." 

The valley which watched toward the moun- 
tain of the apple orchard in full fruit was hidden 
in the mist. I could see no whither. The fog 
filled the crevices in the hills or lazily turned 
over in their sleepy beds. They were in no haste 
to rise. Nor had I been but that my stay was 
brief in this paradise and I was unfamiliar with 
the unaccustomed spectacle and must be up 
and doing while it is apple-orchard-day, for the 
night cometh when I can see it no longer but 
must onward on the circle of my journey. 

The mists that held the valley save at tern- 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 115 

porary intervals and forbade distinctness were 
straggling up betimes over the mountains and 
smoked up along "T'other mountain" and made 
its ascent at times at a leisurely pace as being 
native here, and having other days and needing 
not to do all its mountain climbing in one day 
as I mine. A fog always lures me like a hidden 
voice of wood thrush while the dark begins. I 
like not too glaring spectacles. Calm and quiet 
tints are to my mind, save fall in leaf splendor, 
or the drench of sunset and afterglow on waters 
when there is "a sea of glass mingled with fire." 
I like the glory then; but rather modest tints 
like the shot silk luster on a mourning dove's 
wedding gown. And there is a half dusk in a 
fog. It diffuses itself idly but surely and con- 
ceals so as to give wings to imagination and 
invitation to expectation. In fine, I like it and 
I love it. Had I arranged this scenario to my 
liking, I had had one less satisfying to my heart 
than what I had. God goes beyond our imagin- 
ings. He is always going a little further than 
our largest expectations. We cannot outrun 
him though our feet be sandaled with the light- 
nings. His slowness is swifter than our breathless 
speed. 

I am content. The misty morning veiled the 
day. Expectation laid finger on the speaking 
lips. We were haunted for a word. The apple 
orchard is not more visible than in the dusk but 
was surely near. The apple breath spread through 



116 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

the mist like a brook song as saying, "Fear not, 
I am here." I wandered early through the fog 
toward the mountain, passed apple trees, and 
great apple trees spoke to me like a sentinel 
saying, "Who goes there? Give the counter- 
sign." I halted, saluted and gave the countersign. 
"When the world is an apple orchard in full 
fruit." "Pass on," the apple sentinel said. 

The house of my friends, my good hosts and 
owners of the apple orchard in full fruit, was 
fitting the neighborhood. It made me recall the 
Scripture description so woodsy and out-of-doorsy, 
"a lodge in a garden of cucumbers." The lodge 
was set on a hillcrest. It was a summer habita- 
tion only. No plaster clung to the walls. The 
boards smelled of pine. The bedrooms were 
against the shingles and opened on many sides 
to the Indian summer sky. I was only hoping 
that the fogs might change from mist to rain, 
and straightly charged my friends that should 
they hear rain falling in the night, they should 
awaken me on the moment, for I must not miss 
the patter and pother of the rain on the roof 
where I could touch the shingles with my hands. 
My sleeping chamber opened onto the sky. 
And thus on the mountaintop I seemed to be 
sleeping on the air. Seeing below and above, I 
saw in the night nothing else sleepily and drowsily 
but sky misting around me from the chamber 
of my cozy dreaming. 

And now that the day had waked on the 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 117 

mountains and I was wandering wide awake as 
the day, I could at a goodly distance hear the 
voices of the blessed woman in song or speech 
on her back stoop coming out to boss her hus- 
band, and he bringing the water and kindling 
the fire and bringing the wood and whatever- 
I-can-do-nextly. And when the bacon began 
to fry it mixed its perfume with the apple orchard 
breath tantalizingly. There is in bacon some- 
thing very sociable. The smell of frying bacon 
never intrudes on anything, picnicking, love- 
making or apple-orcharding. It walks easily into 
the company of them all. It is not convivial 
but is sociable. It makes folks chatter and smile 
and has the odor of wood smoke and speaks of 
hospitality. So in the hearing of bacon odors 
I turned toward the lodge in the apple orchard 
in full fruit not as designing to hasten or as being 
hungry, but as feeling the attraction of hos- 
pitality, so that when the man of the orchard 
was bid by the woman of the orchard (as I heard 
her do) to call me to breakfast, I was present 
and needing no calling but when he lifted up 
his voice, I noiselessly said "Adsum," after the 
manner of dear Colonel Newcomb, of fragrant 
memory. 

And what a breakfast it was with the hostess 
for the cook and the host for a butler and I the 
behostessed and be-buttled. The butler and I 
decided in the spirit of democracy to let the cook 
eat with us. She did, for if she hadn't we would 



118 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

not have eaten at all. To be accurate though 
not felicitous, that cook was a lassie. I can say 
that and must. What a breakfast we had, and 
grace after as well as before meat! 

Then for the day. No one could hold me from 
the orchard. Truly I was in the orchard, never- 
theless was orchard bound. 'Twas a spacious 
place and it was calling me by name and I could 
hear the apple pickers coming up the road on the 
winding hill and down from the mountaintop, 
voices of men and women sounding far in the 
damp morning air as though they were near. 
They spoke no secrets though intending so to do. 
These were they who would charge for picking 
apples though they should have paid for the 
chance. Apple-picking is to be classed as play 
and never as work. But some people are un- 
deniably queer. These apple pickers were. Miles 
of apple trees waited their coming. October was 
speeding on toward Christmas. There must be 
no unneedful delay in picking these apples — 
miles of them, and thousands of bushels of them. 
The apples themselves knew it was high time 
for them to cease their badinage with the dusks 
and dawns upon the apple-tree branches and come 
to the spacious cellars with food and perfume 
and apple dumplings and laughter of many 
children. An apple is willing servant of human 
life. It is no misanthrope. ^Nhy should it be, 
having a whole spring and summer through 
had all the winds and birds and stars trysting 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 119 

with it and caressing it? Its life-time had been 
sweet and spent in God's out-doors amid the 
patter of the rain and rustle of its leaves in 
the coming and the going of the winds and the 
callings of the dawns and the gentle intrusions 
of the dark. O happy summer and happy holi- 
day which was to end in making many little 
children happy and contented when they went 
to bed to sleep with a red apple in their hands. 
Happy day and happy apple day for the apple 
orchard in full fruit. 

I heard the apple pickers on the road and I 
heard the wagons rumbling coming to take the 
apples in goodly barrels and baskets to be sent 
rapid transit to the cities far away, and I thought 
how happy the apple orchard was in blooming 
and growing and ripening and being picked and 
finally coming to the helping of the human race 
whose servants they are and whose glad servants 
they love to be. I went out among the apple 
trees among the pickers, where I was an apple 
picker, and the lord of this apple vineyard took 
me to the packing house where the moving belt 
brought every apple into judgment. It was 
Judgment Day for the apples. They could not 
evade. Every basket came from the pickers' 
hands and was tumbled topsy turvy on the 
running belt to find compulsory way each 
apple to its own place and under no mandate 
of man but solely by their own selves were they 
judged, the little, the large, the largest going 



no WITH EARTH AND SKY 

automatically to its own place. The sorting was 
done by the apples themselves, not a voice in 
the air, but the judgment was as truly awarded 
as if the thunder had pronounced the sentence; 
and there was no wailing. The apples accepted 
the verdict of their own growth and went their 
several ways. 

Then the proprietor of the orchard took me in 
the car and went in and out, happy in and happy 
out, of acres and thousands and thousands of 
bushels of apples. The trees were loaded down. 
They hung to the ground under their weight of 
fruit, not a tree complaining at its load but happy 
in it as God's folks are in their burdens. This 
car could do everything but turn somersets. 
It performed all sorts of apple-tree tricks, and 
followed the apple rows and apple trees like a 
bronco follows a steer. The car did not exactly 
climb any apple tree while I was occupant, though 
I think it had done so at a sign. It liked this 
job, that was apparent. It ran up to the moun- 
taintop, wriggled in among the apple pickers and 
apple trees, headed downward when it might 
with all accuracy be said to stand on its head, 
but never have rush of blood to the head, ex- 
plored ravines crowded with the glowing glory of 
roseate apples, capered up on the other hill, and 
always eagerly and smilingly. 

I was in my shirt sleeves ready for business. 
I could climb a tree and turn an apple somerset, 
eat an apple or pick it. I was ready. I ate an 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 121 

apple, I turned an apple somerset, I picked an 
apple. In accuracy I picked many apples, and 
what fun it was to pull a branch down and pluck 
it bare of redolent fruit! I could have made 
myself rich in a few days w:*th my apple agility 
and strenuosity, but I did not. I did show of 
what apple metal I was made, and there the 
demonstration ended; I went on looking at the 
orchard, chatting with the trees, giving them 
and they me a "Howdy do," to our mutual 
pleasure. 

The mist lifted a little but not altogether. A 
piece of torn mantle of fog would now and then 
trail across the orchard or flutter from the brow 
of a hill or mount the mountaintop and then 
return^ not knowing whether it was coming or 
going There was variety everywhere in this 
apple orchard, yet was every minute set to music 
— the low, sweet, haunting music of the fruit. 
The orchard situated on a mountainside had 
this d^^lightful characteristic — that the miles of 
trees uphill or downhill or half-ravine hidden 
were all visible at one glance whether you stood 
above or below. In spring, when these apple 
trees were in blossom, it must have been heavenly, 
and now when these same apple trees were at 
fruit it was heavenly — all heavenly. You could 
see the trees afar off and almost count the apples 
hanging against the blue background of sky or 
the blurred glory of the background of the autumn- 
foHaged mountain as the apples hung like huge 



122 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

rubies, howbeit edible rubies. A ruby is a costly 
stone and very beautiful, but as a matter of diet 
it is a trifle indigestible and hard on store teeth. 
When mine host of this apple vineyard had to 
go down to town at the foot of the mountain 
on business matters pertaining to orcharding, I 
loitered along any apple road that invited, and 
they all invited. An apple orchard is always 
hospitable — fragrant hospitality. Every tree 
beckoned as to say: "Sample my apples. How 
do you like the kind of apple I am.?" What a 
thing it was to hear an apple orchard grow 
colloquial! People think apples are dumb, and 
know no vocabulary and cannot frame fine 
phrases. Such people are ignoramuses and should 
attend an apple orchard school with an apple 
tree in fruit for a staid school-teacher. Truly 
this was a haunted land. Sometimes I could 
glimpse a stretch of road down in the valley 
climbing over the hills and a far-seen glory of 
landscape, the mist floating away and the Indian- 
summer haze lying calmly to the remotest sky 
and veiling the hills with its veil of unspeakable 
loveliness. And as I went onward I would lie 
down betimes under an apple tree, invited thereto 
by the apple tree's shadow and perfume and 
hospitality and wearied a little by my climbing 
down and up, and my excess of gladness in this 
apple world in which I found myself a vagabond 
of the hills. How sweet it was to lie flat on the 
back with the apples burning crimson above me 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 123 

and their bent arms apple-crowded making a 
tent on all sides of me, and the dim blue of the 
sky shining in lattices through the tree branches, 
and now and then an apple falling with a bump 
as to say, "If you won't pick me, I will pick 
myself for you!'' There, with the lassitude of 
the day and the lassitude of my spirit and the 
languor of a happy and contented heart, I would 
rest and refute all invitations to hurry and get 
busy and do something. Were not the apples 
resting a little themselves, and should not I, 
their lover, in consonance with their moods, 
rest too? What a fine argument that is for a 
lazy man to solace himself with. 

I wended my way to the rim of the orchard 
where the forest grew and lay down under their 
shadow where the leaves were thick with recent 
falHng and where as I lay other leaves wan- 
dered carelessly and unhastingly down and fell 
on me like a caress. Can there be any luxury 
sweeter than to lie in fall woods amongst falling 
leaves and see them eddy at every chance breath 
of the wind that wanders down the mountain- 
side, and then, when the wind passes, note 
seldom leaves falling, not because they must but 
because they would. The Indian-summer haze, 
the perfume of the leaves, the resting my head 
on a cushion of multi-colored leaves, the letting 
my lazy eyes wander outward and upward and 
outward and downward where I could see the 
blaze of autumn bonfires in the glorious con- 



124 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

flagration of the woods. And now and then as 
I rose and went forward bHthely but leisurely 
I saw a blue bird's nest in a knotted hollow of 
the apple tree or a robin's nest perched in the 
branch of the trees and intruded on by the 
apples, and I heard along the apple orchard a 
blue bird's voice "ber-mu-da-ing" as being lonely 
and on the wing for the sunny South where 
winter is pushed aside by spring. And I confess 
that I love not the blue bird's sky blue of gar- 
ment or his springtime song more than I love 
his autumnal garment and his autumn song. 
Both haunt me and heal my heart. In the 
robin's silent house where birdlings were, leaves 
now are the nestlings. The robins have with 
easy stages taken their way south. Again I 
hear the blue bird's voice and love him for it. 
His migration more accentuates the blue bird's 
lovely note, not strong as its springtime lyric, but 
sadly sweet like a good-by said in music. I 
wished the blue bird would not go south in 
winter when I stay north, yet they will do their 
blue-bird way to the end of their blue-birding. 
Now their song says: "We linger but we must 
go. We want to stay but the tug of the South 
is on us and our wings want the sky, the sunny 
sky, the haunting sky." And they flew past 
me like blue leaves from a gaudy forest, still 
saying, "Grieve not for us; we shall be back in 
the spring, ber-mu-da, ber-mu-da — and the spring." 
It was a song like the heartache of the falling leaf 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 125 

set to melody. They seem to be singing what fall- 
ing leaves feel and have no voice to utter. 

Still the Indian-summer haze hangs over the 
apple orchard and the miles of trees soon to be 
appleless and leafless — ^just a vintage of empti- 
ness with fallen leaves and fallen snowflakes 
mingled with them. The wind was taking a 
holiday save on the mountain's crest. In all my 
happy life of gypsying with the outdoors I do 
not know a day of sweeter cadences of sky and 
tree and misty hills and pathetic autumnal 
suggestion and voices. "The pathos of a fallen 
leaf," Poet Aldrich has it. It cannot be better 
put. That lovely lonesome hue will last as long 
as the fallen leaf hovers a little in the sky and 
then voicelessly settles to its slumber on the 
ground. My heart rested in the landscape. 

The house of hospitality, the lodge in the apple 
orchard, was visible, sitting silent in the dim 
sunlight as dozing and on the verge of winter 
solstice. The voice of the sweet hostess who 
loved this mountain quiet and solitude saturated 
with poetry could be heard (for she loved the 
pipe organ and was mistress of its sonorous 
melody), and she was singing hymns, holy hymns 
of holy hope and life everlasting; than which no 
music is sweeter nor any music so sweet; and her 
song and voice fitted into the silence and the 
scene and the sky and the cathedral aisle of the 
apple orchard in full fruit as though they had 
been the aisles of some stately minster. 



126 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

Through the orchard here and there were 
mountain springs and their Hquid voice in the 
still October sky dripped a tune no xylophone 
could equal and invited with singing voice to 
lean and drink from the limpid chalice. Over 
one spring a half-up-rooted apple tree burdened 
with apple fruit hung like the very noon of poetry, 
and apples floated in the spring like argosies of 
crimson. All and in all no poetry was adequate 
for that beautiful reminiscent day when the 
whole world of the apple orchard housed us in. 
I could hear wherever I was through the wide- 
spreading apple orchard the homely creak of the 
wagons burdened with apples. It was a homely 
and a happy sound. I loved it. 

The farmer's wife was putting up tomatoes, 
and as a respite was picking up apples in her 
apron to make baked apples for the evening 
meal. Being bidden, I went to look at them 
and her. They looked so good. I dare not, as 
a married man, pass judgment on how she looked. 
I remember my training. But canned fruit and 
vegetables (in glass cans) are pictures. I should 
like to see more of them, and some time when 
I grow rich I am going to have a cellar shelf 
filled with all kinds of fruits the ground grows; 
pickles, and pears and plums, and pickled peaches 
and beets and beans, and apple butter in glass 
cans, and then I am going to go down in that 
cellar and sit and look and look at this art gallery. 
May the day hasten! It is said in the Beautiful 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 127 

Book, "God hath made everything beautiful 
in his season." I should know that now after 
these years of philandering with the out-of-doors 
though it were not said in the Holy Book. I 
entered the farmhouse, and in the "chimbley 
corner" sat an old, old man whom I had seen 
seated in the sunshine in the apple orchard 
taking the sun as if to ripen him as it was ripen- 
ing the apples, and now is he in the kitchen 
where the woman is wiping, with her apron, the 
two quart cans of newly put-up tomatoes and 
he near the stove, for his blood runs not very 
fast at his sunset hour and the chill of the evening 
must enter his blood. The boy comes somer- 
saulting into the kitchen. Life is in that homey 
kitchen — the old man, the blessed woman, the 
tumultuous boy. As I come out I hear an apple 
tired of waiting for the pickers falling to the 
ground, and I go and pocket it for company for 
it and me. It must not be lonesome and I must 
not. 

And I hear the car of my host coming up the 
long winding mountainside and his greeting for 
his wife, my hostess, and I see the blue smoke 
(blessed blue wood smoke) straying from the 
cook-stove chimney and am thinking we shall 
presently have supper in the midst of the apple 
orchard. Supper will be welcome, but it will 
be saddened by the sense that I must leave this 
orchard land and go down again where the 
orchard trees are not bending under their blessed 



128 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

burden of apples. So I start on my last round 
of observation and delight through this world 
of an apple orchard in full fruit. I would linger 
but cannot. Have I not lingered a while, happy, 
resting, through an Indian-summer apple-orchard 
day, with God always everywhere and kindly 
friends and their hospitality sweet and wide as 
the sky, and should I not be content? I am 
content but not through. I never would be 
through with this adventure in leisure. The 
winter would come and lock the door and bid 
me go about my business; and out and up and 
down and along I walked with blithe step and 
blither heart for my last look of this world of 
an apple orchard in full fruit. I hear a tree toad 
singing its same old lonesome song, and the 
cricket unknowing that its chir soon will be 
hushed by the freezing fingers of winter put across 
its lip, and I see the chickens moving sedately 
toward the roost, and the cattle slowly feeding 
nearer to the gate of the farmer's house where 
they shall lie down for their dreams and the 
night; and I throw kisses to the apple trees near 
and far and give God my thanks for the heart's 
delight in a day of such heartsease as will loiter 
along the dusty road of my heart while eternal 
life leads me through eventful years; and I wander 
toward the blue wood smoke in the chimney 
where the lady of the hill notices me as I appear 
and says that her culinary adventure of the 
supper is near triumph, and I see the coming of 



APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL FRUIT 129 

the gloaming and the mists hover a httle closer 
about us; and supper ended, with its voices and 
edibles of hospitality, we dip down into the 
valley and along the river, and this day de luxe 
is bound with sunup and sunset and stars are 
sprinkled on the book's back, and the volume of 
the day is glad with the poem of an apple plucked 
from a day when the world was an apple orchard 
in full fruit. 

And now with the apple orchard far behind, 
and the apple trees standing to catch the wild 
music of the winter's wind, and the mountain- 
side having lost its splendor, but not its music, 
I consider the apple orchard and the wonder of 
its life. In the spring that wide-spreading orchard 
was a bouquet which God might wear on his 
bosom and was perfumed with ecstasy of fra- 
grance. Spring is gone and far passed though 
not forgotten, and the fragrance of the apple 
blossoms is inherited by the apple fruit. The 
apple orchard began in fragrance and in fragrance 
concludes. What a poet God is, and what a 
poem it will be to spend eternal life with him! 

LaiLs Deo, 



XVI 
A JUNE IDYL 

I WAS on the way to a wedding in which I 
was to be the third person in importance, to 
wit: the parson. Firstly, the bride, secondly 
the groom, thirdly the minister. I was to be 
thirdly and lastly, as becometh a minister. Such 
days as the one I write of, no doubt, had gotten 
lovers in the notion of June marriages. Nothing 
was amiss. The sky, the greenery of the grass, 
the lavish chrysoprase of the trees and every 
tree undulant as a green wave, the wind being 
westerly and freighted with all unimaginable 
odors full of all indefinable sweetness learnt from 
all growing things. Familiar as a body might 
be with June days redolent and sweet, this day 
would baffle him. It was as fresh a creation 
as the first firefly. There never had been a day 
like it nor would it ever have a successor. "My 
wedding day," sang the happy bride with shining 
eyes. And who could dispute her.^ Who in his 
right mind or the region of it would ever dispute 
with any woman about anything.? for such dis- 
putation has whence but no whither. But to be 
disputatious with a lady on her wedding day — 
clearly that would be the very noon of folly. 

130 



A JUNE IDYL 131 

Even a lord would not act so. Therefore is this 
June day set down as the effort of Providence 
to fit the happy heart of a happy bride. 

"Love maketh life and life's great work com- 
plete." On such a day, with Love's carillons 
swinging in the steeple of the sky, I, the parson, 
journeyed to the wedding where I was to be 
participant in the eternal gladness of the world. 

The road wound across a prairie mainly level, 
with hills rising a good way off and with slight 
depressions not ravinelike but rather as a settling 
of the ground into a saucer, so the things need- 
ing drink might find a place prepared for the 
slaking their thirst. One such our road came 
past leisurely as not eager to be past it. A swale 
with lush grasses thick-leaved, and hummocked 
where the grazing cattle had waded, sybarites 
of the pastures, with here and there between 
hummocks, a glint of water with its sheen, a 
pool of reflection where a leaning flower might 
see its face; and in the midst of this lush meadow 
a lakelet. Call it a pond and have done, though 
lakelet appeals to me as more poetical. How- 
ever, since Thoreau wrote "Walden" and named 
it Walden Pond, I will not mince words but con- 
clude that any water called by any name is fit 
for prose poetry. What else could we think 
after having lingered over "Walden".? Name 
it lakelet or pond, still the stars are on its night- 
time surface and on it drips the morning dew 
from the leaning marsh grasses and here the sun- 



132 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

set pours its divine light and here may one be- 
hold the silver sickle of the new-made moon 
shining quiet and strange from under the world 
as if it were rising from what Tennyson has 
named "the under world." In the June sunshine 
lay the pond fenced in by hedges of the somnolent 
grasses. 

The high sky was in the pond, though a patch- 
work sky it was, for the trivial water was sown 
to white water lilies. What poetry have we 
here on a stretch of prairie! A lily pond with 
pads lying quiet in the unemotional water and 
the lilies floating, slumbrous at noon. White 
boats with golden centers watching straight up 
into the topmost sky. 

Can anybody look at water lilies with a sun- 
less look? I wot not. I do know one man who 
cannot. That, at least, is not in the list of his 
inabilities. He looks at the lily and the lily has 
its way with his soul. God did a thing the day 
he invented the water lily. I wish I had been 
there. He did it at the daydawn, I surmise, 
when the dews were making rain from the cedars 
and wee rivulets were forming on the ground, 
rivulets of dew slipping out toward the sea, 
some sea, some hidden sea remote. What a day 
of artistry that was, the birthday of the water 
lily! Mayhap we shall hear about that day in 
paradise. O paradise! 

How long any seeing soul could gloat over a 
prairie pond flowered out to water lilies with 



A JUNE IDYL 133 

petals white as moonlight of calm summer nights 
and their golden centers yellow as the gold of 
beech trees at their autumn splendor! "Enough, 
I have seen enough," any right mind would say. 
For myself I could not think out a lovehness 
more perfect than a June prairie dipping to a 
lily pond and sown to water-lily flowers. 

But God thinks things out which beggar our 
expectations. It was so this June day on this 
prairie. For among the swamp grasses which 
girt in their blessed hold the water-lily lake, were 
sown in proud, yet not arrogant, profusion a 
bewilderment of wild fleur-de-lis. Not a few, 
though a few of this chaste blue beauty will make 
a heart dream and sing out like a linnet's song, 
but a profusion of them such as would shame 
the counting. A touch of vision would warn you 
against the arithmetical folly of attempting the 
enumeration of this field of fleur-de-lis. 

I had seen this chaste loveliness many a time, 
though never enough times. You can never see 
beauty frequently enough. But I had seen a 
solitary flower with its enticing shape and poise 
and color beside a stream; and that one flower 
created all the spring. And beside a great lake, 
within hearing of its wrangling waters, I had 
seen a swamp encroached on by the drifting 
sands, crowded with fleur-de-lis, so that the whole 
landscape fairly laughed out loud at its own 
abundance of beauty. But never had I seen such 
sedate multitudes of quiet, blue enchantments as 



134 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

I saw here. They seemed more like a splotch of 
shining splendor out among the islands of the 
Milky Way. They would have rendered any 
place a place of peace and beauty. 

But when a water-lily pond whose surface is 
dappled with lily pads of green, and white and 
gold of lily flowers and patches of water shining 
back the sky — when such a place is girdled with 
a profusion of wild fleur-de-lis with enchanting 
blue and grace of complicated workmanship 
which set all expectations at naught, and all the 
June winds blow; and through all, the bells of 
love ring out their golden happy clamor to the 
heart, I call it a June Idyl and no one is compe- 
tent to arise and say me "Nay." 

A June Idyl shall this scene be set down in 
my memory for the reach of years which we 
name Life: and then for that sunnier reach of 
years which God and his angels name Life Ever- 
lasting. 



XVII 
WHEN COWSLIPS BLOOM 

THE day was in late April. To be precise, 
it was April twenty-seventh. Spring bur- 
geoned. I was on a day ride from Win- 
nipeg to Saint Paul on the Northern Pacific Rail- 
way. In Winnipeg, Spring was a surmise, a very 
modest surmise at that. The grass was green in 
the yards but scarcely visible in the meadows. 
Poplars were not yet a cloud of promise. The 
Balm of Gilead was putting forth its leaf-bud, 
shaped and colored like a thorn of the honey 
locusts and when broken off smelt like summer 
in the prime. But, save for the blackbirds 
swallowing their words in cheerful gutturals and 
the meadow larks declaring with sincerity that 
they had come and Spring was not far behind 
them. Spring was pretty much a matter of faith. 
To walk by sight a body would have guessed it 
was in the circumambiency of fall fog. 

And the journey of five hundred miles was 
bearing steadily down into the delight God has 
named Spring. I think that invasion of Spring- 
time by driving into it on a speeding train and 
Spring wonder thrilling out to meet you and 
caress you is one of the rarest ecstasies of life. 

135 



136 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

Every hour we drove into more Spring, green 
greeneries, more plowing with the blackbirds and 
crows and chickens following in the furrows so 
the farmer might be less lonesome, and through 
the roar of the train which was in a hurry to 
get farther into Spring, now and then a- meadow 
lark's voice came with its ecstatic staccato blow- 
ing in on the heart when the car window was 
shut and doubly shut and the train's voice was 
very boisterous, yet swift like a smile on a face 
we love, comes the meadow lark's fugue of the 
breath of Spring. 

Rains had been heavy. The roads were soppy, 
fields in the main were bidding defiance to the 
plowman though here and there the plow turned 
up the loam of harvests soon to be. It is ever 
to the praise of God that the earth shall bring 
forth its increase and the children of men shall 
be fed. 

Whither hasting, hurrying train.? "To Spring, 
to Spring," chants the sonorous voice of the 
speeding chariot. "To Spring, deeper, deeper into 
the Spring, into the resurrection of the earth." 
It was good to my heart to hear the railroad 
train turn poet, though, as for that, what is 
there or who is there, I have not heard turn 
poet when occasion grows hot as summer breath.'^ 
There is poetry enough to go around amongst 
us all. "Love never faileth," is the golden voice 
of the Madrigal of love. Like the tender voice 
singing out plaintively as a curlew's call, "Poetry 



WHEN COWSLIPS BLOOM 137 

never faileth." It hath more, and, seeing the 
Great Poet's bow abides in strength, we may 
not doubt it will abide always. 

The day's ride is from Spring to Spring, and 
from broad daylight and sunup was through a 
level land. For three hundred miles not a hill 
turned its round shoulder to the sky. Prairie, 
or where prairie had been, and now the fields 
of wheat were doing their best to look like the 
vanished loveliness of prairie grass. No rivers, 
no lakes, no rills, no hints of hills, but near the 
semblances of swamps or hints of sedate streams 
poplars stood thick with their green rinds like 
a growing olive and, later, as we rushed Spring- 
ward, the faintest cloud of faint green was on 
them, and still farther onward the sturdier green 
through which the stems of the trunks rose 
white through the fresh emerald; on, on toward 
Spring! 

Knee-deep in the Spring shall we be ere the 
day turns to the dark. Speed on! Though in 
sooth the train needs no hortation. Spring runs 
like saps through the engine's heart, one would 
reckon, the way it runs on triumphantly Spring- 
ward and is plainly restless in stopping even for 
a moment at the stations and tugs at its traces 
and gives the laggard ones scant time to get off 
the train. Springward! 

Now as the afternoon draws on and the sun- 
shine is at deluge of delight, we run amongst 
the lakes of Minnesota — Detroit Lake and others 



138 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

— and then my breath comes quick as if I came 
suddenly on a cataract; and the cowslips run 
wildly out to meet me. Often had I seen them 
and often had I watched for them. When the 
year is young I eye the moist land where the 
cowslips light their camp fires. I must not miss 
the sight of one of them. To me the cowslip is 
as lovely as the daffodil. I will venture to speak 
my mind though, with sedate voice, lest William 
Wordsworth hear me and call me out his golden 
poem of the daffodils to rebuke me with that 
wondrous voice of poesy. 

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud 

"I wandered lonely as a cloud 

That floats on high o'er vales and hills. 
When all at once I saw a crowd, 

A host, of golden daffodills; 
Beside the lake, beneath the trees. 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 

"Continuous as the stars that shine 

And twinkle on the milky way 
They stretched in never-ending line 

Along the margin of a bay : 
Then thousands saw I at a glance 
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. 

"The waves beside them danced; but they 
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee; 
A poet could not but be gay, 
In such a jocund company : 
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought 
What wealth the show to me had brought: 



WHEN COWSLIPS BLOOM 139 

"For oft, when on my couch I lie 

In vacant or in pensive mood. 
They flash upon that inward eye 

Which is the bliss of solitude; 
And then my heart with pleasure fills. 
And dances with the daflFodills." 

His daffodils: my cowslips. We both are em- 
perors: let that suffice. 

One cowshp makes me sing; and here for the 
first time of my watching them through my 
springtimes, they came on me in torrents. They 
ran like a rushing river. They broadened out 
into lagoons and widened still wider into lakes 
and then came running and ran a footrace with 
the train. Like the stars for multitudes they 
were and everyone is a-smiling. Not a churl 
among them all. "The day of cowslips" — ^hold 
that in thy calendar, my heart. April twenty- 
seven, in the year of God, nineteen hundred 
fifteen, when the Minnesota lakes were playing 
hide-and-seek with us travelers, running to peek 
at us in their game of peek-a-boo and then running 
away from us, reticent and then brazen, while 
all among their marges flowered out the golden 
cowslips, and when a little stream wandered 
moodily where rushes soon would build banks 
for them — there the cowslips come trooping 
with swift delight like a happy song from a 
heart in love. 

There are days and days and days for all 
things. Said a hoary voice of a long-ago, "Thou 



140 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

hast made everything beautiful in his season." 
Say that again, Golden Throat. That brave say- 
ing cannot wither. It must be a perennial song. 
"Everything beautiful in his season." And was 
that old Ecclesiastic turned poet looking at cow- 
slips on the margins of Minnesota lakes on an 
April day when the glory of the sunlight was 
beyond words to picture and the rapture of the 
new year was wild like the flight of happy birds 
flying for sheer love of flight and having no 
whither to journey.^ I wonder. Yet were there 
no buttercups in Palestine. Had He been here, 
he would have said in languishment of tone as 
the cowslips in innumerable multitudes sung out to 
the Spring, "We are here to make you welcome, 
we are here," "God hath made everything beau- 
tiful in his season." 

God hath made this day beautiful in its season, 
beautiful with cowslips, and this is the day when 
the cowslips have taken holiday to welcome with 
unapproachable laughter the advent of the spring! 
"Welcome, Spring, welcome home," the cowslips 
chime. "Welcome, ye golden laughter, sweet 
cowslips; 'tis worth waiting a weary year to find 
ye gladdening once again. A welcome, my cow- 
slips," saith the Spring. 



XVIII 
DOUBLE POETRY 

A MEADOW LARK singing on a pine tree 
— that is the double poetry. And think 
of it! How it sweetens the sky, even in 
the thinking! But the hearing — ah me, what a 
chorus of poetry it did make! 

All my life time have I had the gladdening of 
the heart at the thought of a meadow lark. 
That is probably because I am a prairie man 
and grew up with this bonnie bird of the liquid 
note. Many a morning, wading through prairie 
grasses shining with the dew, have I heard his 
note of sunny cheer ring out with the wild wind 
breath on it and a whole sky of song behind, 
around, above. My ladhood drank in somewhat 
of this music, and as my manhood came apace 
I learned more of the poetry of God's world and 
so came to charm my heart on many more of 
this world's sweet ministries as becometh added 
years. If as the years pass we love not more 
things and have not cheer with wider areas of 
creation, what use have we made of living.? 
We had as well died when children. This world 
grows fairer with every passing day is the testi- 
mony of this one man who has had the song of 
the meadow lark in his heart for years on years 

141 



142 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

and listens for it at each arriving spring here 
with new delight accentuated by the years of 
hearing it and not in one tittle dimmed by all 
the songs he has heard. The last song is the 
sweetest song which has ever slipped from that 
sunlit breast. So on the prairie where this bird 
has his festival of delight, there had I known 
him and his altogether bonnie melody which out- 
witcheries the blowing wind. And the pine tree, 
when was it I did not love that secretive musician 
with the eternal cadence in the voice and the 
perpetuated tears in the heart? I was not boy 
nor youth with the pine. I never met the pine 
tree growing in his grouped majesty of mood and 
music till I was man grown. Therefore my love 
was not that of association. Mayhap I learned 
it of the poets, who are all votaries of the pine. 
That solitary unsmiling reticence has played his 
tunes to all their hearts. "The music of seas 
far away" is forever on the pine. I know spaces 
where the pines are just out of hearing of the sea. 
A plunge through and over sand dunes and you 
are confronted by the old magnificence of the 
sea with its hoary music. And many's the time 
that I lie under the drone of the eternal melody 
of shipwrecks unregretted and am drenched in 
the wild contagion of sea voices which have come 
far and have never lost a note of sadness but 
pour the tears of ages on a body's ears as if that 
was why the sea had come and that was why 
you had come to the sea. And then I have gone 



DOUBLE POETRY 143 

back out of hearing of the sea and have settled 
me as to slumber where no slumber was dreamed 
of, but just settled me to the droning of the sea- 
music which heard not the sea, the sea-music 
of the pines, when skilled as my heart is to dis- 
tinguish "seaborn music," I confess I could not 
say what melodist was playing on its harp, sea 
or pine. "Sea-born music" was I listener to. 
And often I have tried to skill my ear to dis- 
tinguish. The song of the pine was so like the 
song of the sea that I queried. Is not the sea 
tilting its wave-music over the dunes and am I 
not hearing sea voices and not pine-tree mourn- 
ful refrains? How the pine does dawdle with 
our hearts! A tremulous refrain is what you 
ever hear in listening to the pine tree at song. 
It is the mourning dove of the trees. As the 
mourning dove never has note save of sadness 
of widowhood, so the pine in its gladdest voices 
has never merry-making. It hymns funereal 
tunes. And yet does that subtract in aught 
from the dreamfulness of the music .^ Mortal 
are we, and the runes of death are stretched 
strings on which the winds of life discourse rare 
melody. Pine, thou melody somber as the dawn 
of winter evenings by the gray sea, and meadow 
lark, with thy voice free and graceful as the 
waving of the tassel of the corn, yet two to- 
gether, whence learnt ye this orchestral assonance.'^ 
Never save this once had I had this double 
melody. Meadow larks are little given to sta- 



144 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

tioning them in trees for song. I have not often 
known this wizard of the prairie to sing in any- 
thing capable of leaf or shadow. On fence post, 
phone post, or the swaying top of some prairie 
weed, there has this minstrel his station and 
thence spills his sunlit melody into the wind. 
Here, on a pine, sat this meadow lark and swung 
the bell in the steeple of his heart. How I loved 
the tryst — meadow lark and pine! What orches- 
tra, this, the sunlight playing its tune to the 
shadow music of the tearful sea, that was meadow 
lark and pine! I wondered how the meadow lark 
would thrill had he known the poetry of his 
melody. One was there hearing him who knew 
the witchery and loved it and will not forget it 
while he lives here or hereafter. Has God always 
some new thing forthcoming? Will every morn- 
ing in the long and sunny stretch of years eternal, 
have its new ecstasy? Shall there be new varia- 
tion on the dial of eternity so that shadow and 
sunshine shall never be the same in all the long 
unwearying wonder of the years which flute 
music immeasurable and with no tinge of sadness? 
The pine, swaying a little to the push of wind, 
and branches at measured music as of a dirge 
for soldier slain on field of war, and the meadow 
lark, yellow breast shining out, and from it 
rushing like the flow of running water where 
the ways are slanting but not steep, 

"Sweet and low, sweet and low. 
Wind of the western sea," 



DOUBLE POETRY 145 

sweet and low and yet a voice which blows 
across the pine tops to the open waters which 
billow and break in infinite refrain. One more 
poem of God have I been reader of. 

And the day will soon be dark and dark pine 
will be lost in dark night and the night will 
sleep, and the meadow lark will hide his happy 
heart amongst the grasses, but the pine will 
wake and moan and caress the night wind with 
its insufferable anguish of a breaking heart. 
"Soft and low, soft and low," never slumbering 
and never silent, the pine tree and its heart 
and harp. 



XIX 
ONCE UPON A TIME 

JULY it was, and in Wisconsin and on the 
Soo Line on a cool delicious day after a 
heated term superheated when the country 
had been at smother for days, and heat prostra- 
tions had been the headlines on which newsboys 
had done business with their strident voices and 
busy industry. Then came the rain, a whole 
night of it across the State and across the States 
for aught I know; but it was the State I crossed 
so that I speak with unwonted information. 
And the air was refreshing like a touch of cooling 
at the hand of the sea. 

The clouds cluttered up the sky in huge dis- 
hevelment of thunder heads, but frowsled heads 
torn and tossed about like haycocks after a 
rain, no single cloud of any definite form but all 
as if they had been having a romp with the 
wind and had had decidedly the worst of it. 

And, to be sure, I was watching. When I 
watch not the doings of the outdoors I shall be 
dead. Till then, am I all eyes for the sights 
abroad upon any day and all nostrils to inhale 
the happy fragrances and all ears to catch the 
momentary sweetness of passing song of happy 

146 



ONCE UPON A TIME 147 

birds or splash of wind among red clover or 
rioting wheat. So I watch. Nobody knows 
what shall befall me on any day when I am out 
of doors and the growing world has its wealth 
of saps at rise through every artery. My per- 
petual eagerness is on me, only proportioned to 
the time of year and the wonder of cool sky. 
All places out of doors are challenges to which 
I wish humbly but surely to make answer; for 
the challenge clearly is God's. 

My train was rushing wildly into the arms of 
the wind which tossed about all growing things 
bonnily. The fields were dappled with sunlight 
and cloudlight. Let me coin that word.^ I need 
it and none will be the poorer for this liberty 
accorded me. We are all the while needing new 
words when we are out doors. God makes the 
things and we must make the words, so shall 
there be work for him and us, and such labor must 
always prove a luxury, a serene luxury of spirit. 

This panorama of fields thus dappled with, 
one moment a flash of exulting sunlight and the 
next an equally exulting cloud shadow, was 
running fleet as a star past my eyes. The right 
of way of the railroad might be for giving wild 
things a growing and life chance, a place once 
again to have coronation rather than for the 
soberer purposes of commerce. But both things 
flourish under one charter. These things must 
not come to the knowledge of the demagogue 
lest he bring action for a trust. 



148 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

The season had been delayed, the previous 
winter having been the severest in many years, 
and spring, being frozen in, had been dilatory 
in coming. Even on arriving so late, it had had 
its nose and ears and fingers frost bitten and its 
bare feet decidedly frozen. Thus it was that 
the shadow on the dial of the year was a trifle 
awry. It is good to have it so, lest we should 
grow priggishly sure of things and seasons with- 
out taking the pains of looking. 

On we rushed through green to green, all glad, 
all gladdest. No room for dumpishness any- 
where, just one rush from loveliness to loveliness. 
Then the apocalypse in whose honor I write. 
The right of way was immensely wide, for what 
purpose I know not, but to what purpose I dis- 
covered. Room was here afforded for nature to 
do some pranks. And she did. We took a run 
and jump into such a profusion of color and 
variety of floral decoration as made even an old 
stager with these bewilderments of God to take 
a sharp breath which ended in a cry like the 
cry of discovery. Here was a dazzling huge 
cluster of black-eyed susans which burnt a hole 
in the prairie and stayed blazing like sunlight 
set on fire. Following in immediate succession 
such a profusion of dancing daisies tall and 
tossed and white-and-gold-hearted and all at joy 
of life, and then beside, in quick competition, 
horse mint, huge patches, so as to blot out the 
ground with its gentle luster of tourmaline pink. 



ONCE UPON A TIME 149 

I had seen much of their unbidden and unre- 
quited beauty, but not in such freshet as this, 
not so thick-set in the sod nor so bent on showing 
the sky just what sunset pink on snow it could 
indite as a real poet when it truly tried. Then 
hustled into the procession (for "hustle" every- 
thing did and "hike," hustled into view and 
hiked out of view. Whoever invented those 
w^ords did service for this event. You may say 
those words are not poetical nor in good form, 
but you should be told, good friend, that good 
form in the notion of the Creator is the thing 
which answers the needs of the time, and these 
words surely answer the need of this time of 
the year and me). Hustling into sight with a 
leap, like the coming of a company of children 
topsy-turvy with joy and laughter, and fret-free 
as the wild blowing of a summer wind. That is 
the way of the coming of things this day along 
this way. Then hustled into sight dwarf elders 
which were growing low against the ground and 
clustered in groups like politicians at a conven- 
tion, and the flowers were as the foam from sea 
waves caught and held aloft. The beauty was 
unthinkable but undeniable. I rubbed my eyes 
lest I should be dreaming, but when could I 
dream such a beatific dream as this, spume from 
a shore wave here at toss on a windy prairie? 
Sea foam so far back and inland .^^ But here it 
was. I saw it with mine own eyes; and they are 
good when I do not wear glasses. 



150 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

On the shore of this unfickle sea foam far from 
home were ranks on ranks of tiger lilies. I never 
had seen that before. Wild tiger lilies had I 
seen, but by fews, never by manys. What a 
coronation for a place and day! One tiger lily 
with its brick tint and its spots of black paled 
a little as of a faded blackbird wing, is sufficient 
to thrill the moment of discovery. I have many 
such moments in my memory; but I had not 
seen them in companies; only in little bunches 
like a family with mother, father, and a few 
children. Here they wandered in literal multi- 
tudes, a colony of enticing chrome tints like a 
multitude of children off on holiday. 

Swift on the track of this gift of the day was 
such a tumult of wild tansy as I had never been 
witness of. Tall and stately but multitudinous 
and in color of flower like old ivory. Watch them, 
reader of this itinerary — the red and spotted tiger 
lily with its happy territory invaded by the stately 
tread of ivory-white flowers, every one erect as a 
soldier on duty and many, many marching, march- 
ing. Would you had been there with me! 

Then at a turn of the stair of that day the wild 
drift of a field of flax in delicate flower of 
exquisite and attenuated blue to rim this profuse 
variegation of uninvited neighborliness. Blue sky 
windows above; blue flax flower below on the 
ground, a faint sapphire flooring for the dome 
blue and a rimming for the flower fields where 
the angels had been glad to stay. 



ONCE UPON A TIME 151 

All this had I seen on a July day from the 
window of a plunging train on the Soo, a travel 
day when weariness was rife and care was plenti- 
ful, but a day when through the lavish kindness 
of the Chief Gardener I had been bid to walk 
at leisure through some unaccustomed paths in 
his Eden. 



XX 
JUNE O' THE YEAR 

IT was one of those exulting days of which 
one, two, or three at most are to be looked for 
in the whole stretch of any summertime. 
There are days and days. Any day is a day of 
delight when water whispers on the shore 
and the clouds play hide and seek with the sun 
and the light is bewildering as newly rinsed with 
a great rain in the upper and lower skies. But 
when it is June-o'-the-year and spring gladdens 
into summer as day into dark, or dawn into 
day, unnoticed, when the skies and the ground 
conspire with the growth of plants and the 
flowering of plants, and things of bloom merge 
into things of fruit, and all these keep one guess- 
ing what season of the year this is, then that is 
June, and June is now. 

It is sweet spring and young summer in the 
calendar. These are all days of appearance and 
evanishment. Loveliness knows not how to 
tarry. The kisses she blows from her fingers 
are kisses of greeting and good-by. The pathos 
of growth which drips a tear on the cheek of its 
smiling is that she may not linger. Like the 
shadow of wind-blown clouds, it does not quite 
touch us till it is departed. 

152 



JUNE O' THE YEAR 153 

True as all this is, true is it also that no summer 
is rich enough to gift us with many perfect days. 
This day I write of was one of these; and for it 
the God of days be praised. Day and night for 
a week had been raining and cloudy and cold. 
The night air was shivery like North Sea air. 
The night was made for deep sleep. By the 
almanac there was a sickle of a new moon 
(heavenly advent), though we knew it not by 
the sight of our eyes. Clouds prevented and 
whispered in rain on the shingles of our summer 
roof where we could hear in our sleeping room 
the merest whisper of a drop of rain. A body 
lay awake rather than sleep lest a single rustle 
of the garment of the rain should elude him. 
Sleeplessness and slumber were one in comfort. 
We can sleep any time when there is nothing else 
for the doing, but dripping rain must be listened 
for and listened to when it slips past in the dark. 
I had hurried to the sleeping chamber in the 
daytime to hearten me by barkening to the 
cadence of the rain lest I should miss the patter 
of a single drop. 

On this day I now celebrate the morning 
awoke without a cloud. Our one robin red- 
breast awakes the day by the ringing of his 
morning bell. Who or what would not wake to 
hear the robin's morning call.? The phoebe began 
her plaintive widowed proclamation that she was 
phoebe, phoebe, as if certain some one was deny- 
ing her identity. She proclaimed with added 



154 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

emphasis that she was phoebe. There was no 
getting away from that unless she married and 
changed her name. Then a lone crow flew low, 
almost touching the treetops of my morning 
lattice on his way to the open sands of the placid 
lake of great water. A heron flew over the lake 
near shore, taking her morning way to the sand 
dunes, where her nest was set among June 
grasses. Lake Beautiful lay calm as a picture and 
untroubled as a quiet heart. 

I could not resist the lure of the morning, but 
naked-footed, to disturb not the household, 
descended the stairs, took one oar, shook the 
yesterday's sand from my to-day's shoes, and 
hastened with blithe feet to the curve of the 
river where my convoy of rowboats are looking 
at their white shadows in the water and, demure 
as not seeing me, uttered no exclamations of 
surprise when I untied one of them from its 
spile, sunk neck deep in the water, stepped into 
the boat's tilting, sagging and swaying hospitality, 
seated me coatless and hatless and collarless and 
plied my one oar as desiring to see the way I 
took, and thus I rode taking the morning, dewy, 
moving landscape to my heart where the mists 
lay like silver veil on the shore or drifted like 
visible perfume over the rising dunes or climbed 
over the banks of the stream and then spread 
wings and vanished in the forest. Such water 
lovers and lovers of rowboat have lost much joy 
who know not the delight of sitting with face 



JUNE O* THE YEAR 155 

to the boat prow and dipping a single oar held 
in both hands and thus making noiseless voyage 
save that the lapping of the water on the boat 
prow reminds you of all sweet music your ears 
have ever heard. That lapping of wavelets on 
the prow of the rowboat is to me celestial as 
among the sweetest voices in the variegated 
orchestra of God. I love it, love it. 

Down the river, out of the river into the wide 
expanse of the shoreless water. As you look 
outward not a touch of wind on the face of the 
water. This is a sea of glass. I lean and look 
and see the golden sands at deep depths and 
the golden rays of sunlight weaving their skeins 
of beauty on the sands at the bottom of the lake, 
and stop plying my solitary oar. This dear boat 
on the quiet lake lies like a lily on a silent stream. 
The fisher boat up the shore is hauling in the 
nets and I can see their spoils struggle and flash 
in the sun as they tumbled to their death. A 
sweet silence holds Lake Beautiful in thrall. She 
is the sleeping beauty which only the wooing 
wind shall know how to awaken. The sun flames 
and warns the water to cease slumber and awake 
and arise, but the waters do not heed the sun. 
They only answer smile for smile while never a 
ripple starts anywhere. The innumerable min- 
nows dash to and fro in infinite frolic. The under- 
water world is at play as well as the over-water 
world. The swallows wheel inland but do not 
cast their shadows on the mirroring waters of the 



156 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

lake. The phoebe still makes mention of her 
name. My boat looks at her own lovely shadow 
in the water. But we must on. Then I dig my 
one oar into the crystal wave and make glad 
way out far to sea. It is so trancing to stand out 
well from land in this bonny craft and from afar 
out look at the dunes aflame in the morning 
sun. The air is crystal like the wave. I see the 
far north sandheadlands stand up Eke a cliff of 
the sea. But my boat and I must turn toward 
the river waiting for us. Low against the water 
anything on the shore has a height because my 
boat and I are part of the water. We are not 
haughty, only calmly content to see all things 
on the shore or in depth of wave. Still not a 
ripple on the water. After long vagabondage 
on the lake with no destination and no engage- 
ment to shorten our engagement with the wonder 
of the sea and summer sky, the boat swerving 
to the slightest touch of oar, I turn prow shore- 
ward, go up the winding river so dear to my 
memory and on every curve of the bank is the 
sleepy nodding of the redolent green things of 
water and shore and I note the bashful beauty 
of the birch trees along the climbing sides of the 
stream which climb up to the austere altitude 
soberly yclept "Mount," and where the river 
turns and looks long miles inland I anchor and 
lay the oar down for rest while I who plied it 
go to breakfast with the dear folks of my 
household. 



JUNE O' THE YEAR 157 

Think you this day is ended? Be more witful. 
'Tis just begun. The boat and I are getting 
ready for the real day. This pretty outing was 
mere make-believe and is poet-prelude to the 
poem of the day yet to be written. Thus I go 
and get two women very dear to me, and who 
never are quite out of my thoughts and bring 
sundry edibles and cushions, and hats and um- 
brellas to obsquatulate the freckles of the day's 
journey under the sun, and with blankets and 
baskets and kickshaws, and knickknacks and 
giggling in various meters, we three enter the 
waiting boat; and one woman in the stern and one 
for a mermaid in the prow, and I for stevedore 
and miscellaneous roustabout as also, speaking 
poetically though sweatingly, the gondolier, set 
out. The day is beginning well. I now have 
the oar locks and the other oar to keep the one 
oar of the morning company. So we set out on 
the voyage of the day. 

The wind has spread her sails just a wee bit. 
A boat-sail would not flutter to so trifling a wind 
if one were to call it by so imposing a name. 
The morning is cool and sweet. The river widens 
upward at this part of our voyage. A line of 
birch trees gleams white along the shore, holding 
up their tops of green tracery against the sky. 
The day is very sweet. My cargo smiles and 
sometimes sings. 

The sky inland as we voyage is piled with 
clouds anchored and white. A thing I have 



158 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

never seen so persistently anywhere else is always 
in evidence here, that is, that however cloudless 
the Great Lake sky may be, though not a wisp 
of cloud hangs its veil anywhere, yet when I turn 
my eyes inland up this river I have never once 
known the clouds to be absent. They lie there 
like great fleets with sails apparent but not 
touched by any seawind, or sometimes they lie 
like a quiet sea islanded with innumerable ice- 
bergs. I love the sight. It is filled with a haunt- 
ing suggestion I cannot explain. It tells of an- 
other landscape where abounding quiet holds 
lasting Indian summertime. We were rowing 
upward into this land of dreams with the fleets 
of cloud; and flocks of icebergs like huge sea 
gulls lie to the forward. So with the music of 
dipping oar and the music of the voices of my 
beloveds, rebuking the gondolier or encouraging 
him, upward we go where the clouds always 
gather and the fleets are never broken by a storm. 
Over us as I ply the oar, high-up clouds begin 
to scatter, chased by the wind, and later the 
wind touches the repose of the stream and blows 
fresh and wistfully; and at the landing where 
we shall picnic the wind gives us welcome, and 
the boat brought to land and the cargo discharged, 
we leave the folded oars to rest on the bosom 
of the resting boat and make our happy way 
to a deep and blessed shadow of some brawny 
beeches which hold eternal friendship on a hill 
which gives wide view of the windings of the 



JUNE O' THE YEAR 159 

river and the marshes and the meadows, home- 
like with grazing cattle and the farmer making 
hay on the lush meadows. And over the soft 
ground as we come the wild strawberries grow 
and the wind makes all the wild flowers dance 
with glee. One of my sweet voyagers gathers 
flowers and is a picture of dear delight to my 
heart. Her dress blows in the wind and she, 
stooping to pick the flowers, is a picture no 
painter could paint. And still the wild straw- 
berries are everywhere. Well, this is paradise. 

The meadow lark calls from the grasses; the kill- 
deer shambles about the sky with plaintive call; the 
bobolinks are at June rapture and invade the blue 
sky with their ecstasy and flutter to the meadow all 
music, which though a body were a sphinx he 
would be sure to be caught in the rapture of: 

O it is June o' the year! 

And here I, the chef extraordinary, gather 
pine branches and light the fire and proceed to 
cook the steak while the women are gadding 
about the meadow lit with flowers with the 
swift wonder of the swaying grasses in the wind. 
A man nowadays has no time to go gadding 
about with beauty. He must be body servant 
to beauty, and so I here with the pine music 
over me and the shadows of the beech trees not 
far away, and the wind making merry with my 
hair, which has no hat, I lean to my task like 
a galley slave chained to the oar. Such is the 
lot of man; but I am a good cook and a Christian 



160 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

and do not sulk, but when dinner is served give 
the dinner-call and the beloveds come and are 
seated with much laughter on the blessed spongy 
ground and are served by the man servant and 
they criticize with feminine generosity of crit- 
icism, but do not forget to kiss the cook; and 
that soothes my wounded feelings. And when 
they brag on the cooking I am a happy galley 
slave though bound to the oar. 

This dinner business and the kissing business 
ended and the chef discharged and the gondolier 
retained, we all make glad to lie down in the 
windy shadow of the beech trees with shadow 
all but impenetrable even to the stabbing sun- 
beams of this golden day. Just to sit or sprawl 
when the wind comes unwearied and has made 
mad journey over a wide water and up a wind- 
ing river and over a meadow sown to starred 
flowers and pine trees and grasses which have 
the everlasting smell of the dampness of the 
world, and the haK weariness bordering on sleep 
which characterizes the rushes and the reeds 
and the true river meadow, just to wait and 
laugh out loud without explanation of the laughter, 
and see things too deep for words but not so 
deep as the thoughts they compel, and to stay 
bareheaded and let the wind work its will in 
dishevelment, and rest the heart with the unknow- 
ing comfort of the rush of joy from the world 
so good to be in and so packed to its center with 
radiancy and welcoming. 



JUNE O' THE YEAR 161 

In due time we start to the wild strawberries 
again, all of us, not as wanting the berries but 
wanting their witchery, their smell, and blush 
on the fingers that pick them, the perfect riot 
of wind-blown flowers sullen because the wind 
will not let them stay long enough to get hold 
of a single strawberry and then to stop and look 
and inhale the smells all mixed together in hilar- 
ious breaths and then down to the boat which 
by this time is rested from its voyage upward 
and ready for its homeward trip. 

The beloveds are aboard and both of them 
trail their hands in the water and finger at the 
lily pads while I row among them, and say sweet 
things of each other and to the humble oars- 
man with the singing heart; and slowly we go 
as not needing to do other than loiter amidst 
the day's delight, and with the river all bubbly 
with the wind and touched here and there to 
foam we make our home-bound way to come 
toward evening into the shadow of the pine- 
crowned mount, where in the shadows the boats 
lie waiting and my boat of the day comes with 
a contented heart to its anchorage with its 
sister boats, and their shadows and its own, and 
thus wait for the night and its whippoorwill 
call and its stars. 



XXI 

THE CURLEW CALL 

A JUNE Sunday morning in a delayed 
spring. I was in eastern Illinois near 
the Wabash River as it holds diligently 
to its business of keeping Indiana and Illinois 
apart. My business there was to dedicate a 
beautiful country village church with a tower and 
a bell of golden throat which should, through 
dawning and darkening days, spill down on the 
heads of this countrystead the call to think on 
and worship God. 

After breakfast I started out Bible in hand 
to read that precious book under the morning 
light of the Sabbath day. But whether to read 
the Bible or not it is a heavenly book to hold 
in the hand, for it has innumerable springtimes 
shining through it and singing through it and 
perfuming it. A little way back of my host's 
house I saw a big wandering barn that beckoned, 
I thought, a little slyly as if makmg a sly wink 
for me alone to see. I slyly winked in return, 
as courtesy demanded, and with apparent uncer- 
tainty in direction as wood smoke on a sleepy 
evening hesitates aloft before it dreams south 
or north or west or east — and then, my touch 

162 



THE CURLEW CALL 163 

of harmless affectation being concluded, I dived 
into the barn. I did not miss my guess. It was 
an old, old barn built wholly of oak boards, beams, 
rafters, mow floors — a thing which in our day 
had been a fortune of gold. In this barn was 
room enough for a young windstorm to have 
tired itself out in. Horses munched their hay. 
The wind strayed in and strayed out hke wan- 
dering birds intent on nothing much. The sun 
was trying to smoke hot to give delayed wheat 
and corn a boost for catching up. I fooled around 
in the barn a while. I smelled of the hay in the 
ancient mow. I pried about in true neighborly 
fashion and only honest intent. I wanted to 
find eggs hidden in out-of-the-way corners. But 
the hens were not egging: they were singing 
about their intended activities, that Lord's Day. 
While I dote on eggs I prefer a hen's song. It 
is so blithe, so breezy and confirmatory of inten- 
tion and proof absolute of the happiness of the 
hen's heart, that I never miss that happy nature 
song if I get a half chance to hear it. 

Pulling an oak peg and softly opening an oak 
door, I am admitted to a green barnyard lot 
across which went a path of immediate direct- 
ness. No sauntering pathway made by the 
lingering feet of cattle coming from pasture at 
the sunset, but a hurry-up path to get to pasture 
where breakfast was waiting for them. At the 
end of this path was a lane, one side hedge-grown 
and the other side a fence old but not senile, 



164 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

on the other side of which wheat was growing 
with a silver touch upon it looking toward the 
gold of harvest, and the wind making merry 
and being giddy with the silvery sheen of the 
wheat. The lane went dusty and printed with 
hoof marks. The wind was gentle and smelling 
of growing things. 

So I sauntered with a Sabbath heart full of great 
gratitude for mercies beyond reckoning and thus 
came to the lane-end, climbed over the wooden 
gate and came into the pasture where horses 
were grazing near the gate, content as if know- 
ing it was the day of rest. Cattle were near by 
at breakfast, and were scattered about the pasture, 
and chickens were a long way from home. They 
were chicken gadabouts. One red rooster far 
too far away from home for a lone man, made 
much of my intrusion and cackled a persistent, 
exaggerated cackle, which was the ladylike 
thing to do but scarcely becoming a man. Why 
I irritated him so he did not distinctly state, 
but he may have noticed my Bible and long 
coat and have taken me for a preacher. What- 
ever his ground of antagonism to me, he made 
that antagonism noisily apparent. In due time 
he shook the dust of his feet from him and went 
his manly way and left me to the kindly solitude 
of the grazing horses and cattle and the content- 
ment of the Sabbath morning. One lone tree 
grew on the east edge of the pasture near the 
gate. I invaded its solitude and sat me down 



THE CURLEW CALL 165 

underneath its invitational shadow and leaned 
against its bole. The morning though early 
was hot and shadow a mercy to be desired. 
There I sat, the gladness of June around me, 
the sky lifting its Sabbath dome above me solemn, 
serene, exultant, and full of God. There I sat 
happy guest of the shadowing tree and exultant 
sky and the kind, good God. My Bible open 
before me, spake of holy and high things. My 
heart was in a mood of worship as my heart 
ought always to be. I heard a robin singing 
near at hand in bubbly melody. I heard a quail 
call across the pasture from a field of com just 
high enough to toy with the wind as it passed 
by. God has not many bird-voices which charm 
and cheer me more than the bob-white call, 
so liquid, so full of content and so far carrying, 
and sweet as the ripple of water, so in keeping 
with his trig form garmented so faultlessly in his 
spotless garb of spotted brown, so swift of whirring 
wings in suddenness of improvised flight, so unim- 
migrant an inhabitant of our summer and winter, 
so good a friend of the crops of wheat and corn 
and the farmer, who so seldom knows the philan- 
thropist the quail is — and to hear his flute-note 
come over the pasture full of spring and summer 
merriment! It is a healing of the heart to hear 
this bonny songster make merry with the golden 
day. Once I saw him on a distant fence post 
exultmg in his Sunday song and I exulting in it 
more than he. A whole day of Sabbath joy was 



166 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

in his throat and to me all the Sunday was sung 
across by his song. I had gone to my preaching 
in full content through the day, long in the music 
of that voice. 

So was I considering when, to my surprise, I 
heard a killdeer and then saw him staggering 
about the sky as on broken wings. His was a 
drunken flight, drunk likely by an inebriation 
of the June day. I could certify it was enough 
to make bird or man drunk with delight, had 
they hearts to feel the land and the sky and the 
wonder of God. No marshes were hereabouts 
and what this killdeer was doing here I could 
not guess, though it was enough that he was 
here. Inquisitiveness is no wisdom when loveli- 
ness is near. Let loveliness suffice without the 
poor pin-prick of curiosity. I like to be incurious 
— just to bask in the presence of the thing-to-be- 
desired and to-be-admired and to-be-rejoiced-in. 
That is how to deal with a thing of beauty which 
is a joy forever, as friend Keats has immortally 
phrased it. I have on my little patch of ground 
on which I pay taxes a wild rose whose tint is 
the color of pure flame. It is as if a rose leaf 
sprang into exultant fire — a puff of prairie fire and 
then out forever. Why shall I in a fit of curiosity 
address me to inquire the how of the flame instead 
of giving myself to the rapture of this astonishing 
blossom .f^ Why be part scientist with why and how 
instead of all poet with rejoicing song and ebullient 
delight over the thing of loveliness? 



THE CURLEW CALL 167 

So I take the killdeer with wandering voice 
and staggering flight into the open window of 
my heart and leaned against my tree-trmik and 
took the wandering shadow unthinkingly yet 
wisely. 

Then a mourning dove fluted plaintively as if 
heartache that even June could not abate was 
using this bird as a harp full of tear-drip music. 

Enough. The day has had its holy and happy 
choir of sunshine and wandering path and wan- 
dering cattle feet and satisfying hedge-row, and 
field-row, and growing grain and caressing bird 
voices, when, O wonder! a curlew's call like a 
scythe mowing its swath in the prairie sky made 
me leap to my feet and dance like a leaf in the 
wind (a rather portly leaf, admittedly). A curlew 
call! Only one curlew had I heard in twenty 
years, and that on a great plateau among the 
mountains of Montana in companionship of the 
daughter of my heart when we were vagrantly 
taking our way to Careless Creek. That weird 
voice had flung me into a mood of a thousand 
memories of prairie days, and June ecstasy made 
with the prairie wind. The undiluted Montana 
sunlight, the far distances through the amazing 
splendor of light which had made great painter 
Turner, worshiper of light, laugh out loud in his 
solemnity of spirit, the rim of the landscape and 
the mysterious mountains so remote as to seem 
things of cloud and yet were they things of 
earth, substantial as the world — and then all 



168 WITH EAi IH AND SKY 

of this glory to be made a sounding gallery for 
a single curlew call! And now, here among 
farmed fields and neighborly dwellings and a 
prairie which had forgotten it was ever prairie 
at all, and with prairie grass not even a dim 
memory, a curlew call! Blessed be the Kind God 
for this unexpectedness. He is ever and anon 
thrusting on us like an unexpected cloud and 
the sound of running water when we know not 
a water brook is near. The curlew call — that 
was to make the day of spring immortal to my 
memory. To me one curlew call can render one 
sunny year radiant and memorable. 

I cannot tell just why the curlew call affects 
me so and uses my heart as a woodpecker uses 
a bare branch for an instrument of music. It 
haunts me. It is not alone thrilling, it is beguil- 
ing and haunting. 

It is as if the prairie were lifting its tear- 
drenched, melancholy cry for all those wide 
breadths it had once been and was not now. 
That sickle curlew bill flings out that weird voice 
like a tear-wet banner. It is a wail that is the 
very ecstasy of sadness like the mad song in 
Lucia de Lammermoor. I recall when I heard 
the curlew first long since as a prairie lad and 
how I heard that strange pathos flung out on 
the prairie wind at morning or evening where 
the curlew had his nest, and that voice has 
dwelt with me like a memory of a gray sea seen 
at dawn through all these distant years. 



THE CURLFAV' CALL 169 

And now I hear it in hu utterly unanticipated 
locality. I am elate as if saluted by a voice I 
thought was dead. Enough! Yet not once did 
I hear my curlew call, but twice, thrice, four, 
five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven times! 
What a happy count it was, though I mislike 
arithmetic. 

O happy day, a memory fitted to make a gray 
heart glad with sunlight and a sad heart swift 
with song. 

The church hour draws near and I hear the 
church bell calling across the pasture, and I 
take my backward path toward that holy habi- 
tation of prayer and consecration and the love 
of God. But through the voices of the choir, 
and the rapturous melody of the hymns of God, 
I heard the voices of dead summers in the curlew's 
call; for all the things that God has done are fit 
cooperants of the house of God. 

And in my golden Book of Days I write down 
"God's June Sunday when I heard the Curlew 
Call/' 



XXII 

GATHERING CHRISTMAS MISTLETOE 

Locus: Oklahoma. 

Tempus: Day before Christmas. 

Dramatis Persona: The Author hereof. 

ANY day when a lover of outdoor things 
finds a new outdoor thing is a holiday 
to the soul, and if it were reverently 
called a Holy Day there would be no flippancy 
of speech or spirit. I could make a rosary of 
such golden days, the beads whereof should be 
more than dandelions on an April field. The 
mere mention of such things makes me wistful 
as a November wind, full of the floating of fallen 
leaves. 

To hear some new melody sweet nature has 
composed is worth wandering across a hundred 
summers to listen to, and then it is recalled that 
there is no need for so long a wandering and 
waiting for its bubbling up like a bubbling song. 
I who never grow blase in nature things need no 
inviting to take me out into the country where 
a witless stream wanders witlessly and heedlessly 
as having no need for haste or any thought of 
destination and where in the wide bend, a field 
of ripened corn unhusked blazed in the naked 

170 



CHRISTMAS MISTLETOE 171 

Oklahoma sunlight and sussurated to itself all 
day, bidden thereto by the constant blowing of 
the wind which seemed not to stop to catch its 
breath, even as frogs who fill a long night with 
a quaint vociferation of comfort and unaccounted 
for joy. 

I was free-hearted and alone. The Christmas 
presents for my special beloveds who were at 
home were labeled so all I needed to do was to 
fill them in the happy stockings on the chimney. 
I committed to memory the birds' song of Jesus 
which the latest-come apostle has preserved for 
us as in amber: "It is more blessed to give than 
to receive," and I was quite ready to be a recip- 
ient of that beatitude. So, carefree in a swiftly 
blowing wind in the rustling corn, I came afoot. 
"Footing It in Franconia" is the title of a book 
of loitering in the hills of New England. I am 
footing it in the haunts of the mistletoe. 

Footing it anywhere if there be leisure is suffi- 
cient delight for me. Standing on the good 
ground anywhere under the sapphire sky is to 
me an ocean of comfort and delight. And when 
the heart is full of love and sweet suggestion of 
wife and child, neighbor and friend, yesterday 
and to-morrow, to-day and God, and then the 
feet are free with no hands beckoning return 
and no voices bidding hurry, then the whole 
sky and ground of things bids feet and heart 
to loiter and enjoy. Then is there bound to be 
a festival of joy wherein the wave oflPering of 



172 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

contentment and feast is the gracious logic of 
the day. 

I needed no Horatius Flaccus, poet of the 
Roman midday, to bid me "carpe diem." I 
had a saying sweeter to my soul than his, saluting 
me. It was the voice of the great Chief Poet 
out in the open field as springtime when the 
winds were with swift compulsion bending the 
wild flowers into an ecstasy of prayer and laughter 
and adoration at the feet of the Great Gardener 
in praise of the Lord of the wind and flowers. 
Enjoy this day is Christ's constant invitation 
set to song. I am ready and exuberant for the 
joy of the day. 

I had my lunch with me, to wit, a beefsteak 
and a loaf of bread and a pinch of salt; and there 
was the winding stream and the riot of fall 
leaves coming and going at the wind's will in 
their desperation of delight. I knew there must 
be somewhere out of sight of anything save the 
sky and the nearby naked trees where I could 
scratch the match and light a fire and see the 
blue smoke curl and lie down on an innumerable 
company of russet leaves odorous and balmsy and 
watch the blue smoke curl from the fire, built 
from branches which the winds had hacked from 
the trees in profusion for my coming so I might 
cook a beefsteak on the very best culinary instru- 
ment in the world, namely, a dry forked stick 
which the winter and snow and rain and winds 
had sanitized. No city "chef" nor "cafe" nor 



CHRISTMAS MISTLETOE 173 

"eat" hectored me with their affront to hungry, 
or the strident cry of the aproned waiter, "Ham 
and straight up," should slap me in the face 
when I should become an hungered. I could 
eat to the music of wind voices in the trees and 
the spacious sky for a dining room and no haste 
nor breaking of dishes to garnish the meal. So 
no famine confronting me, nor schedule to be 
met calling my name stentoriously I left the 
railway station nothing loath and footing it 
blithely but not hurriedly I came on the way 
of my adventure. 

Speaking openly, I had come to hunt mistletoe. 
The trees were leafless and so thrust into prom- 
inence the clusters of mistletoe hanging far aloft 
which in green June had been hidden in June 
greenery, but now in winter leaflessness when 
June blossoms were all spent and June leaves all 
dropped from its dead hands, among the petals 
of its innumerable roses, nothing green blazed 
out in the sky but the mistletoe. In summer 
the greens are so preeminent and luxuriant that 
green subtracts from green and one tint of green 
subtracts from another tint of green till by the 
compulsion of multi-greenery the wonder of it 
all becomes less heavenly. Now, in December 
the day before Christmas, no green was any- 
where visible save that of the classic mistletoe, 
swinging high on beckoning branches of leafless 
trees. It was a thing to invite the soul to walk 
leisurely and languidly or lie on the ground 



174 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

reposefully and regard unhastingly the vivid 
green of the swaying mistletoe. 

In a world of hurry it is so refreshing not to 
hurry and not to need to, but to make faces at 
haste as at a school-teacher when her back is 
turned or school lets out in spring. Haste has 
been so intrusive on my leisure that I dote on 
snubbing her (or should I say him.^^), and the 
wind puflPs her cheeks and the trees swayed and 
creaked as thinking themselves rheumatic and the 
blaze of green mistletoe badgering me as to say: 
"You think it is winter. Dolt, it is June; see my 
green at the trees' top." I said, "It is June, deny 
me if you dare." When I was too filled with 
comfort and my heart was too full of praise in 
such an hour of peace to let the pert mistletoe 
prod me into disputation, but changing from one 
elbow to another I winked and said "Mistletoe, 
have your way," and shut my eyes and listened 
to the voices of the December wind fretting in 
the treetops although they were not Decem- 
berly. 

Should this piece of vagabondage come to have 
a reader, she-he or he-she might captiously sug- 
gest this essay is entitled "Gathering Christmas 
Mistletoe." It is miscaptioned. Hie thee, 
loiterer, to thy task. Ah, friend (he or she), you 
mistake this case. This is a loitering loiterer's 
expedition. This is no rush telegram, but a 
"male" order. Come, reader, be thyself loiterer. 
Give thy speed surcease. Speed thee loiteringly. 



CHRISTMAS MISTLETOE 175 

Do not finger the leaf of the book in thy hand. 
Let the wind idly flutter the idle pages. Do not 
gaze, just look. A gaze is a concentrated look 
and that requires energy. Looking may be just 
bovine, looking and seeing nothing or seeing 
things as in a hazy dream far across as in an 
Indian summer landscape. Lie down as the idle 
cattle do and possess thyself in peace while a 
wandering leaf rustles past or a blue jay loses its 
temper because he sees thee lying under his tree. 
I am gathering mistletoe in easy stages. I am 
prospering in my quest when I idle with the 
stream and dance with the leaves and listen to 
the wind, not caring what tune it pipes. It is 
Oklahoma winter, the day before Christmas, 
sown wide and wild with sunlight. I fairly hear 
the sunlight drip from the branches of the cotton- 
wood trees; and the sound of dripping sunlight 
is a music not often heard but held in high esteem 
of those who listen for seldom voices under the 
blue sky. Though seeming inactive, I am lethar- 
gically whetting my knife to be surgeon for the 
mistletoe not as having a knife out of my pocket, 
but as being likely to do so at any moment. I 
might, I might not; that is the humor of it. 

The sky is June blue, not the milder blue of 
December. It has no almanac; it needs no 
chronology, or better, it needs no chronometer. 
It has a memory of June days and is looking it 
in the face. So have I. June skies may well 
become that June dav of the vear, the Christ 



176 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

Day of the year, so it is welcome and at home 
at this blessed day before Christmas. 

Lest Christmas day be here or ever I gather 
any mistletoe, I will to my deed. I rise lingeringly, 
dive into my pocket leisurely, take out my jack- 
knife leisurely, set down one foot before the 
other leisurely, take my coat off leisurely, ditto 
my vest, for I must climb trees in my quest, and 
tree climbing to my certain knowledge is ham- 
pered by clothing. I will retain trousers and 
shoes lest my cuticle be handled harshly. And 
now forward to the ascent. I start toward a 
cotton wood which I see mistletoe monopolizing. 
It has a crusty rind. Yet I am no coward. On. 
It has no branches near the ground, yet I will 
essay at the attempt at climbing. Just when 
precipitant to do this deed a covey of quails 
whirs up from my feet. They set my soul a-flutter 
like a fluttering leaf with their swift rising and 
swifter flight. They rise like a young cyclone 
taking to wings and sky. They disappear swift 
as a thought. They mistake my intent. I am 
no huntsman with death in my advent, but a 
peaceful Christian huntsman hunting Christmas 
mistletoe, under which osculatory auspices I shall 
kiss my wife and daughters, and likely enough 
my son. It will be half-past kissing time and 
time to kiss again when we shall come under 
this particular branch of mistletoe for which I 
now make quest. 

And now, after this sweet intrusion of winged 



CHRISTMAS IVnSTLETOE 177 

beauty, I set out toward the cottonwood of the 
surly rind, and unsociable look, but with this 
mistletoe cluster defying my acrobatic powers. 
My solitary regret on this voyage of acquisition 
that happy, happy day is that there was no wit- 
ness to my feat of scrambling up that corrugated 
trunk and rushing down the same trunk in a 
most unpremeditated, and I will allow, most 
unministerial way. The tree was a noble bole. 
Its growth had been from long ago. Few things 
in nature are so noble as a great tree trunk, 
and few tree trunks as noble to my eyes as the 
cottonwood trunk. Great gashes in its bark as 
if hacked there by a crusader battleax or the 
sharp ax of a lightning, it frowns defiance and 
despite upon me, not knowing, I choose in Chris- 
tian charity to believe, how partial I am to 
cottonwood trees, trunk, branches, leaf, and 
summer music of the fretted leaves and spring, 
fresh green in summer time shining like metallic 
trivial shields and catching the rain on their 
roof of foliage ere it kisses the ground and mingles 
with the dust. Had the cottonwood tree known 
this, it would have bidden me welcome to its 
high places. However, being modest and diffi- 
dent, I gave no hint of my preference but essayed 
my arduous ascent. There was where the cloud 
of witnesses was needed. So much fun in seeing 
a man not do what he came to do and did not do 
should not have gone to waste. It was like 
wasting kisses. The incorrigible cottonwood tree 



178 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

would not smile even gruesomely. It was mad. 
By and by I was mad too. I was skinned. I 
am bleeding, and various parts of my anatomy 
are out of fix, and I am at the bottom of the 
tree instead of up in the tree branches where 
the mistletoe clusters. I had slid down; I had 
bumped hard. I had been nearly up though 
slowly, and had come totally down not exactly 
rapidly but with a speed of electricity and with- 
out interruption and no one to see it! O the 
wicked waste of fun. After several unsuccessful at- 
tempts at anabasis and other sundry extemporized 
and highly successful katabases I was winded and 
skinned, with pantaloons rent in sundry places (but 
they were ripped before) . I am no lackwit whatever 
the Cottonwood tree thought, and had brought 
pantaloons — survivors of other climbing episodes. 
They were old climbers as well as old timers. 

As I sat on the ground in unhesitant fashion 
where I had been deposited by the force of 
gravitation and the surly mood of the cottonwood 
tree, I bethought me of my beefsteak and loaf 
of bread and pinch of salt. Happy thought. 
I will increase my strength and might by cooking 
and eating my edibles, and then, probably, bring- 
ing up a heavier attack, I shall take the citadel. 
So I fished out my matches, gathered some 
glorious wolf-brown leaves together, some dead 
cottonwood branches strewn about, struck the 
match, saw the match flame catch to the leaves 
and the leaf flame grow ardent and the branches 



CHRISTMAS MISTLETOE 179 

catch and then the fire; and the precious perfume 
of leaf and branch fills all the air and the blue 
smoke lifts its fitful, shifting cloud and blue as 
the blue sky is into which it climbs. Then I 
piled more dead branches and hunted a forked 
stick and impaled the steak and proceeded to be 
a sybarite of the woodland. Talk about cooking! 
I am a chef for a Caesaric household. Then I 
ate my own cooking — a thing which few cooks 
dare to do, or if they do, do not survive. I ate my 
dinner from the stick till there was left only the 
stick, which, I being no gormand, did not eat. Then 
I sat and looked at the wood coals and the still 
rising smoke and heard the south wind blowing 
north, and the lotus nepenthe of the wind and the 
wood smoke and the dinner- eating-under-the-sky 
all but overcame my sense of duty and my spirit 
of adventure. For, whatever others think, I 
vow I came to gather Christmas mistletoe. 

So I arose like a knight of the grail and went 
back to the aggravating and impertinent and 
un-Christian cottonwood trunk where the mistle- 
toe was jesting at me and covertly giggling 
at my many mishaps in ascent and equally 
many successes in descent. Conclusion : I climbed 
the tree. Can't you hear me do it.^^ The beef- 
steak and bread accentuated by the salt had 
done business. My heavy artillery and infantry 
had done what my cavalry charge had failed to 
do. I ascended. The mistletoe quit giggling, 
but the cottonwood was madder than ever. 



180 WITH EARTH AND SKY 

So, laughing in spirit and with my lips, I 
gathered the curious green-branch parasite with 
its fruit, white touched with green. A strange 
plant it is. The seed is viscous and soft as a 
baby's flesh; and to wonder how it can plant 
itself on the rind of a cottonwood and take root 
in that barren soil; and, more of a mystery still, 
how it can take root in the rind of an oak, that 
soil hard as a frozen ground inside the arctic 
circle. With the brown, sweet soil where the 
wild spring flowers grow, mistletoe seed will 
have nothing to do. It spurns that lovely hos- 
pitality to things that care to grow. And with 
inexplicable aspiration it takes its perch on the 
swaying branch of a gnarly tree. Parasite it is, 
but airy parasite. It aims high. The ivy roots 
in the ground and climbs the trunk and mantles 
trunk and branches. Not so the mistletoe. 
It spurns the ground. It lights like a silent bird 
on the high branch. It cares not for the tree 
trunk. It wants height, and light, and the cradling 
of a swaying branch rocked by the wind. The 
oriole builds its nest on the far branch-tip; the 
mistletoe, not quite so adventurous yet adven- 
turing far from the trunk, clings to the wind- 
blown branch and there roots its pretty wilder- 
ness of startling green which in \\ inter when 
branches are bare and shadow and music are no 
more, rocks its startling emerald when the world 
about it has forgotten greenery. 

While the wind cut capers and the angry 



CHRISTMAS MISTLETOE 181 

Cottonwood did its best to shake me down, or 
at the least, to make me battle for my mistletoe, 
I cling here hardily like a sailor to a mast on 
windy seas and on swaying ship and show this 
particular wind and this particular tree what 
a much of a man it has to deal with; and I pro- 
ceed leisurely, as befits a pleasurer, to do this 
particular Christmas shopping. All's delight. 
I gather the mistletoe and toss it down trust- 
ing to the wind to cushion it for its fall. Swaying 
like nesting birds, I pursue this Christmas glad- 
ness and gather enough mistletoe to give festival 
for all our Christmas kissing. 

I come down leisurely as becomes a man who 
has succeeded in his quest, gather my mysterious 
Christmas spoils, and in the blowing wind and 
clear sunlight dimming now a little toward 
evening, begin footing it home in happy return 
for the happy day and happy voyage in a revel 
of adventure doing a thing I had never before 
done. 

And when I came to the house that held my 
loved ones, the lights were lit and I was given 
a kissing-welcome under the mistletoe of my 
own gathering, which was a welcome home to 
sow sunshine across my landscape of life for all 
years everywhere. 



